JavaFX links of the week, August 22

by Jonathan Giles | Aug 21, 2011 | Links

A heap of interesting links this week, so I hope there is something of interest in the links below for you! As always, feel free to email me your links if you think they are worth sharing to everyone else. Let’s get into things!

• The JavaFX 2.0 beta builds keep on rolling off the production line. This week we have build 40 ready to be tested. From my point of view, the most exciting thing about this release is the performance improvements we’re starting to get into releases. Our specialised performance team are finding memory leaks and CPU hogs, and the engineers are doing their best to get things as performant as possible. In particular, b40 includes a heap of performance improvements to CSS and controls performance. Of course, there are plenty of bug fixes, and the general polishing that is expected of a relatively late-stage beta release. As always, my plea remains: please get it onto your machine and give it a good thrashing. Bug reports and complaints are highly appreciated!
• Dean Iverson has been busy posting two screencasts about building GroovyFX applications on to his blog. The first screencast is about how to get started with Griffon, GroovyFX, and JavaFX. The second screencast is concluding the basic introduction, introducing features such as binding, automatically generating properties, and keeping your JavaFX user interfaces as succinct as possible using the power of Groovy.
• We posted an updated ‘Introducing FXML‘ document. This should hopefully answer some of the questions you have.
• If the technical documentation above isn’t enough, there is also a ‘Getting started with FXML‘ article on the Oracle JavaFX website. This article works through the process of building a simple, example application and gives a good overview of how to work with FXML.
• And if that documentation isn’t enough, the JavaFX documentation team at Oracle have just posted a blog about all the new and updated documentation that recently got pushed online. They’re doing an excellent job making sure there is a lot of high-quality documentation about JavaFX 2.0, and my hats are off to them, knowing how much the engineers have increased their workload by changing APIs over the last few months.
• Tom Schindl has released e(fx)clipse 0.0.3, which includes CSS validation improvements for customising the look of your applications.

Have a great week everyone 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, August 15

by Jonathan Giles | Aug 14, 2011 | Links

I know I sound like a broken record…but where does time go?! It’s mid-August already! This past week was a relatively quiet one in the JavaFX world, but despite being quiet there are some very interesting links this week. Let’s get into it 🙂

• Dean Iverson has finally blogged about the work he and Jim Clarke are doing on GroovyFX. This is a good read for anyone interested in building JavaFX 2.0 user interfaces without all the verbosity of Java.
• Tom Eugelink put out a new release of MigLayoutFX2 to fix some bugs, and also announced a name change to MigPane to be more consistent with the naming pattern used within JavaFX.
• Narayan has released the source code for his AutoFill TextBox. He has blogged about this previously.

That’s all for this week – I hope you found a few links useful! Catch you next week with more JavaFX links 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, August 8

by Jonathan Giles | Aug 7, 2011 | Links

Welcome to another week of desktop links. This week there are a number of links, so hopefully there might be some that are of interest to you! Let’s get right in to it 🙂

• JavaFX 2.0 beta build 38 came out last week. This release was primarily a bug fix, performance tweak and API clean-up release, although it did also include the JavaFX 2.0 Beta Packager Tool.
• Here on FX Experience I reposted an internal introduction to FXML document. This post introduces FXML to quite some depth. FXML is the scriptable, XML-based markup language for constructing Java object graphs, and in particular is designed for building JavaFX user interfaces.
• Per Bothner has blogged about JavaFX 2.0 applications written in Kawa. His first post is an introduction, with the second post showing how Kawa would handle JavaFX animations.
• Tom Eugelink has put out a new release of MigLayoutFX2 to get it working with the latest JavaFX 2.0 beta builds.
• Patrick Champion has posted a very simple example using FXML.
• Niklas Hofmann posted about an ImageView Node he wrote for JavaFX that handles SVG images. Note that it requires Apache Batik.

Catch you all in a weeks time 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, August 1

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 31, 2011 | Links

Another month down, leaving only two months until JavaOne 2011. Of course, the big news last week was the release of Java 7. Besides that, there are some good links this week (as always!), so let’s get into the rest of this weeks links 🙂

• JavaFX 2.0 beta b37 was released, to enable developers another weeks worth of access to FXML, the XML-based markup language for (optionally) creating JavaFX user interfaces. It’s optional because you are by no means forced to build UIs in FXML – you can continue to freely use Java, or indeed, any JVM-based language. It’s just another option for those of you that like using XML for UI layout, and certainly it is a great format for tooling support and UI interchange.
• GroovyFX continues to flourish with improved support for JavaFX 2.0 and improved GroovyFX documentation. I have to wonder, are any other JVM-based languages doing similar? Get in touch with me if  you are working on something!
• There is a brief video on YouTube with Jim Weaver presenting about ‘JavaFX in the real world‘. Of note is that Jim makes use of Grezi in his presentation, which I have linked to in previous weeks.
• At OSCON/Java, Jim Weaver promised to make available the source code for his EarthCubeFX application, which is a port of his original EarthCube application from JavaFX 1.3 to use the latest 2.0 beta builds. You’ll also note that he has a YouTube video which demonstrates EarthCubeFX running on Mac OS X.
• Jonathan (not me) has blogged over at The Java Tutorials’ Weblog about the top five docs to introduce yourself to JavaFX 2.0.

That’s all folks! I hope you found something useful in the links above, and as always: keep up the great work, blog about what your discovering, and feel free to contact me with any links of interest! Catch you all in a weeks time 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, July 25

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 24, 2011 | Links

Here we go again – yet another intro to a blog post series that hasn’t changed much at all in the years it has been running (both here and on my personal blog)! For that reason, let’s just jump into the links (which, lets admit it, is the real reason you’re here). Enjoy! 🙂

• JavaFX 2.0 beta build 36 was released this week, including some new features like worker threading, rich text editing (via the HTMLEditor control), and a file chooser dialog, among many bug fixes and optimisations.
  
• Michael Heinrichs, an engineer in the JavaFX team at Oracle, has blogged about upcoming changes to the properties API.
• Parleys.com has put up the video from Devoxx 2010 titled ‘Physically Attractive‘, which consists of Richard Bair and Jasper Potts talking about physics in the JavaFX scenegraph, 2D/3D graphics, and “bullets, bombs, explosions and inflicting damage”.
• James Weaver published an article on using transitions for animation in JavaFX.
• Patrick Champion blogged about how he created a Duke animation in JavaFX using the latest beta build.

Also, I thought I’d link to the JavaOne conference sessions, which are now published online. For those mostly interested in JavaFX, you might want to refine the search criteria to the Java SE track. Additionally, a tutorial has appeared online recently that details MigLayout. Despite being most commonly used in the Swing world, it has been adapted to numerous other UI toolkits, including SWT and JavaFX. The JavaFX version is available online (but I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that the JavaFX SDK comes with the GridPane layout, which may meet your needs).

Keep up all the hard work folks. Catch you all next week.

JavaFX links of the week, July 18

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 17, 2011 | Links

A relatively quiet week in the world of JavaFX, but hopefully you can find a link or two of interest! 🙂 Let’s jump into them…

• I interviewed Jim Clarke and Dean Iverson here on FX Experience. These two are the developers behind the GroovyFX project, and give a good insight into what GroovyFX offers over-and-above programming with JavaFX 2.0 in Java.
• jojorabbit4 has put up part one of his series on JavaFX 2.0 CSS styling. This is a long and detailed read – well worth doing if you want to alter the looks of your JavaFX applications.
• Two few weeks ago I linked to a video of a zoomable user interface written in JavaFX. This week Bertrand Goetzmann has opened up the source code on his Grezi project. Of note is that Grezi is built using GroovyFX, and is already being used by people for public presentations.

That’s that for another week. As always, feel free to email me links you want included – I appreciate the hints you all give me! Anywho, catch you all again in a weeks time 🙂