JavaFX links of the week, July 11

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 10, 2011 | Links

Welcome to another week of JavaFX links! 🙂 Let’s get right into it.

• There was a new beta build of JavaFX 2.0 put out this week – b34 includes drag and drop support, as well as a Java to JavaScript bridge for WebView among the numerous bug fixes, API tweaks and performance improvements.
• The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group is planning another meeting this week, but I’m not sure what the topic is. It is on Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 6:00 PM at the Oracle Conference Center.
• Tom Schindl has released e(fx)clipse 0.0.2, which includes improved CSS editing support, as well as the start of better JavaFX integration into Eclipse in the form of JavaFX library specification in projects, a ‘New JavaFX Project’ wizard and JavaDoc integration.
• jojorabbit4 has updated his ComboBox control to allow for more customisation.
• Narayan Gopal Maharjan has put up a AutoFill TextBox with support for as-you-type filtering and auto-complete.
• The GroovyFX project is continuing to get noticed – this week hideaki-t put up a custom browser using GroovyFX to demonstrate the power of GroovyFX and JavaFX.

I hope you all found something useful in this weeks link roundup. Keep up all the hard work folks, and I’ll be back in a weeks time to link to you all over again.

JavaFX links of the week, July 4

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 3, 2011 | Links

July already?! I know I say this often, but man, where does time go?! Also, happy Independence Day to the American readers out there (even though it’s technically not until tomorrow in your part of the world).

There are a heap of links, so lets jump right into it! 🙂

• Richard Bair blogged about one of the changes coming up in the next beta release of JavaFX 2.0 (build 34), namely new threading APIs.
  
• Antoine Mischler let me know about the JavaFX 2.0 release of FXForm2, which is a library for building user interface forms. It looks very full-featured for such an early release, and there is some good documentation to get started with.
• Tom Schindl was interviewed by JAXenter about his E(fx)clipse project, which aims to provide tooling for JavaFX development inside Eclipse. He talks about where the project currently is, and discusses a few areas of research he is considering pursuing.
• Jeff Friesen has posted part two of his ‘JavaFX 2.0 Beta Getting Started’ series. You can also read the first part if you want to catch up.
• Lawrence PremKumar has two blog posts: a custom SpecialPopup class (that isn’t actually extending Popup), and an example of how to load images in the background whilst showing the loading progress.
• Benny Gächter has posted a port of his ‘avoid the red balls’ JavaFX Script game, now written using JavaFX 2.0.
• Bertrand Goetzmann has posted a short video of Grezi, a simple Zooming User Interface that he implemented with GroovyFX.

That’s all for another week. I hope you all found something useful! Until next week – keep up the hard work folks 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, June 27

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 26, 2011 | Links

Here we go again, with this weeks batch of links. Thanks to the people contacting me with links and praise – it’s all much appreciated 🙂 Anyway, let’s get into things…

• There is an Oracle webcast coming up on the 30th of June that is titled ‘The Code of Enterprise Success Begins with JavaFX 2.0‘. It features Jai Suri and Jasper Potts talking about JavaFX 2.0, and might include some interesting news and demonstrations.
• Tom Schindl has announced e(fx)clipse. The 0.0.1 release is minimal but no doubt useful for JavaFX 2.0 developers choosing to use Eclipse: it introduces a CSS editor that supports the JavaFX -fx extensions.
• Jim Connor has blogged about translating a JavaFX Script application to JavaFX 2.0.
• Stephen Chin continues to present the ‘JavaFX 2.0 With Alternative Languages‘ talk at conferences. He has just posted the slides for his talk at Jazoon, where he covers using JavaFX 2.0 with Groovy, Clojure, Scala, Fantom and Visage.
• Speaking of alternate languages, probably the one leading the pack is the GroovyFX project, which obviously provides improved Groovy support. They’ve just put up a heap of documentation that demonstrates how to use the JavaFX APIs using GroovyFX – be sure to check it out!
• Artem Ananiev has covered how to size your windows in JavaFX 2.0 easily.
• Seyhan Basmacı has blogged about building a JavaFX 2.0 sample application, which features a login form as well as a TableView, communicating with a remote server.
• jojorabbit4 has blogged about creating a custom JavaFX 2.0 ComboBox control. For what it’s worth, I spent a few hours this past weekend creating one as well, which may turn up somewhere sometime soon. I even posted an image or two to tease its current state (which is: unfinished, but much better than nothing).
• Laurent Nicolas has blogged about creating a simple JavaFX 2.0 slide presenter.
• Narayan has written about masking in JavaFX 2.0.

That’s all for this weeks folks. Keep up the blogging and exploring of the Java desktop APIs. Catch you in a weeks time! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, June 20

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 19, 2011 | Links

Another week of JavaFX links – hopefully you all find something of interest. Also, thanks to everyone emailing me links!

• Richard Bair did a quick post talking about the code names for JavaFX releases.
  
• Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein has trawled through the JavaFX Jira issue database and offered his thoughts on where the JavaFX project is heading (and what issues it has ahead of it).
  
• jojorabbit4 has blogged about a DeckPane control he has built (and released the source code for). He tells me it is still a work in progress.
• Narayan Maharjan has a blog post about using the PieChart component to visualise data coming from a database.
• In another post, Narayan has blogged about shape intersection, subtraction and union in JavaFX 2.0.
• Mohamed Sanaulla has a blog post about using Groovy and JavaFX 2.0 to build a JSON-parsing geo-coding application. I should note that a good chunk of the JavaFX code I see seems redundant – rather than using the listeners (and anonymous inner classes), Mohamed should instead consider using binding (e.g. longitudeValTextBox.textProperty().bind(longitudeProperty))
• I put up a very beta release of the JavaFX cell factories project I’ve been working on.

That’s all I have for you this week. I’ll see you in a weeks time 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, June 13

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 12, 2011 | Links

Another week, another batch of links. Let’s just get right into it!

• GroovyFX was announced this week by Jim Clarke, which is a library that makes building JavaFX 2.0 user interfaces easier (when written in Groovy, obviously). The features include a SceneGraphBuilder, TimelineBuilder, bind syntax and a GroovyDSL to support colors, durations, timelines, enumerations, etc. I’m very excited to see alternate JVM languages starting to adopt JavaFX 2.0 now that it is all Java-based.
• Speaking of alternate JVM languages, here are two blog posts by Emil Kruczek about using JavaFX 2.0 in Clojure.
• Tom Schindl has taken JavaFX 2.0 for a spin, and thinks that JavaFX 2.0 is looking pretty good, which is kind considering he is an SWT fan. Despite this, he says that “[t]his makes me a bit sorry about SWT because compared to what JavaFX provides to me SWT is light years behind.”
• In a separate post, Tom blogs about using Xtext to create a JavaFX-CSS editor, which, he theorises, could quite nicely become part of an Eclipse JavaFX 2.0 plugin (along with other Eclipse-based techonologies).
• Rafał Rusin has blogged about visualising GIS data in JavaFX 2.0 beta using GeoTools.
• I put up a link to my in-progress JavaFX Control Cell Factories project. Currently you can just check out the (clearly beta quality) screenshots and see what the API looks like (hint: fully static API with a lot of Callbacks – I can’t wait for closures to clean this up!).

That’s all for another week. I hope you all found something useful in the links above. Catch you again in a weeks time, and keep up all the hard work folks!

JavaFX links of the week, June 6

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 5, 2011 | Links

Now that JavaFX 2.0 beta has been out for a week or two, and a refresh build already published, the number of links we’re starting to see covering what is going on is definitely increasing, as you can see below. As always, feel free to email me any links you want to have included. Right, this is a big post, so let’s get into it!

• A new JavaFX 2.0 beta build came out this week. I’d recommend to everyone that they update as soon as possible. Just as a heads-up, we’re on a two-weekly cycle for public beta builds, so keep an eye out for new builds as they always include new features, bug fixes and improved performance.
• Nandini Ramani, Vice President of Development at Oracle (a.k.a my bosses boss), has been interviewed by the Java Spotlight podcast, where she talks about the JavaFX 2.0 beta release.
• Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and I have been busy here on FX Experience. We’ve talked about Maps in JavaFX 2.0 (using WebView), and introduced the indeterminate CheckBox and SplitPane controls. We’ve also been posting important links immediately, rather than hold them off for the weekly links roundup.
• Amy Fowler has blogged about the JavaFX 2.0 layout APIs, giving a great introduction to what has changed since JavaFX 1.3. Layout APIs are always a tough nut to crack, but once you do it makes your user interfaces so much easier to build. I highly recommend reading this blog post!
• Artem Ananiev has posted a good introduction to the JFXPanel component, which allows for embedding JavaFX nodes into a Swing application.
• Tom Eugelink has published his MigLayout port for JavaFX 2.0 to Java.net, where it is published under the Apache 2.0 license. Note that in addition to this MigLayout project, JavaFX 2.0 includes a GridPane layout that is also very functional.
• The Silicon Valley JavaFX users group is running another session this week: ‘Hands-on JavaFX Coding in Alternative Languages‘. This talk is being hosted at Oracle HQ on Wednesday, 8th June at 6:00pm. As usual they will be hosting the session online for those of us who can’t attend in person.
• Jeff Friesen has blogged about ‘Rebooting JavaFX, Part 1‘.
• A number of people have posted their first impressions of JavaFX 2.0 this week, including Gerbrand van Dieijen and Illya Yalovyy.
• Lawrence Premkumar has blogged about dynamically setting the side of a TabPane. TabPane is another of the new controls in JavaFX 2.0, which I plan to blog about in more depth sometime soon here.
• jVel has blogged about using custom cell factories in JavaFX 2.0 (Google translate is used). This is another important topic that I intend to cover in more depth in the future here on FX Experience.

As always, keep up the great work blogging folks, and I’ll catch you again in a weeks time.