JavaFX links of the week, June 7

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 6, 2010 | Links

Another week, another bunch of links. It seems like you lot have been very busy! 🙂

• We introduced two new preview controls in JavaFX 1.3: MenuButton and SplitMenuButton. We also implored you to read Amy Fowler’s recent blog posts on layout in JavaFX 1.3. Finally, we gave the site a bit of a spit-shine, with more visual tweaks to come in the next few weeks – what’ya think?
• The JavaFX docs team have put together a huge article on ‘Tips for developing on the JavaFX TV platform‘.
• Jim Weaver has posted a BorderLayout container that he built as an example of how it is possible to build custom layouts in JavaFX.
• Rastislav Komara has posted about a new feature in NetBeans Composer in the 6.9 RC1 release: grid container support. Note that NetBeans 6.9 RC2 was also released this week.
• Speaking of NetBeans Composer, Antoine Mischler has blogged his thoughts about it, as has Nick Apperbly.
• Stephen Chin has posted his Jazoon slide deck for his recent talk which was titled ‘Building Data Rich Interfaces with JavaFX‘.
• Also related to Stephen is the announcement that the Apropos project has been open sourced. This is an ‘Agile Project Portfolio Scheduler’ written in JavaFX.
• Mikhail Gorshenev has been posting a bunch of JavaFX TV posts recently. They are titled ‘3D Scene Support in JavaFX TV‘, ‘TV-Friendly Focus Traversal‘, ‘Simple CSS Styling‘ and ‘3D Carousel‘.
• Speaking of Mikhail, he is presenting at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group this week. His presentation is called ‘Top Secret JavaFX TV Preview‘. The presentation is on June 9 at 6:00pm PST, at the Oracle Conference Center.
• Osvaldo Doederlein continued his research into the JavaFX scenegraph by continuing the development of his JavaFX Game of Life implementation. Fortunately this week he has more positive things to say about the scenegraph 🙂
• Rakesh Menon, who recently left Oracle to join Cisco, has posted his JavaFX Wish List. All I can say with regard to his wish list is that I know we’re working on improvements to many of his comments!
• Antoine Mischler has blogged about using inversion of control in a JavaFX application.

As always thanks to everyone for the hard work you do, and an extra round of thanks for blogging about it so that we can all learn from your experiences. As always you can email me or find me on twitter if you want to chat. You should also follow the @fxexperience twitter account to be informed of new posts to this site. Until next week – keep up the good work folks! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 31

by Jonathan Giles | May 30, 2010 | Links

Another week, and unsurprisingly I have another bunch of links for you folks. Thanks to everyone for blogging your thoughts and what you’re working on – it’s great to hear what everyone is thinking of and doing. As always, feel free to ping me with any links you may have that you think are worth including.

Now – on with the news!

• Richard Bair posted how to embed fonts in JavaFX 1.3. Now go wild and use as many fonts as you possibly can in a single scene: the more, the better!
• Amy Fowler has posted another of her JavaFX layout blogs, this time covering growing, shrinking and filling – new API added in JavaFX 1.3.
• Dean Iverson continues his explorations into the improved CSS support in JavaFX 1.3. As always, I highly recommend giving this post a read if you’re building GUI’s in JavaFX……and if you’re not building GUI’s in JavaFX I worry for you 🙂
• Speaking of CSS in JavaFX 1.3, Rakesh Menon has blogged about how to style ListView/TreeView controls.
• Osvaldo Doederlein has been investigating the JavaFX Script language and has some suggestions for improving it.
• Mikhail Gorshenev has created a custom ListView skin for TV. Note that this skin completely replaces the default skin, meaning that it doesn’t support cell factories or virtualisation (meaning that it is far more expensive to create huge lists using this skin rather than the one that comes with JavaFX 1.3, which is super performant).
• Exadel have updated version 1.3.1 of the JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse. If you’re curious, you can read about what’s new in this release.
• Patrick Champion has posted about creating a distortion effect in JavaFX.
• Thomas Butter has posted about working around JavaFX 1.3 video issues.

That’s all for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – I’ll catch you all again next week (or sooner if you’re on twitter) – same bat time, same bat channel.

JavaFX links of the week, May 24

by Jonathan Giles | May 23, 2010 | Links

A huge amount of JavaFX news and links this week, certainly something for everyone, I hope. As always, I’m keen to hear from you folks with any news or links you think should be included. Either message me on twitter or email me.

• The JavaFX documentation team have updated both the JavaFX 1.3 Migration Guide and the ‘Using Layout Containers‘ documentation.
• Rakesh Menon has posted a TableView implementation he has created. It makes use of our new Cell architecture for virtualising scrollable areas (e.g. We used it in 1.3 for ListView and TreeView). Whilst his approach is basic, it works in JavaFX 1.3 and may certainly meet your needs.
• Jan Goyvaerts posted an A* path finding implementation in JavaFX this week, which is very cool. He has included a very good writeup, as well as the source code.
• Osvaldo Doederlein has posted a JavaFX implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. In his usual style he dives deep into performance implications and how he thinks they can be worked around. A great post.
• Alex Ruiz has announced the release of version 1.0b1 of the FEST JavaFX compiler Maven plugin. This plug-in compiles JavaFX source and test files.
• Stephen Chin has announced a beta 2 release of JFXtras 0.7, which aims to get JFXtras working on JavaFX 1.3. Importantly, this release has controls ported over to JavaFX 1.3. He has also blogged about his upcoming JavaFX talks at Jazoon and JavaOne.
• Antoine Mischler has blogged about his thoughts on developing a business application using NetBeans Composer.
• The NetBeans team have put up a good article on data binding in NetBeans 6.9.
• The Exadel blog has a post covering some of the features of the JavaFX plugin for Eclipse that they develop.
• Nii Osei-Agyemang has started a new blog covering how he plans to use JavaFX for GIS. Some recent posts cover his planned GIS architecture, how he ported to JavaFX 1.3, and how he is making use of JavaFX web service APIs.
• Speaking of GIS, I came across the PiriMap JavaFX application which does a similar thing. Unfortunately, I only have a video to show.
• Daniel Ziltener has posted an example of how he used the JavaFX Storage API, and is seeking your thoughts on how to improve it.
• I put up the slide deck I used for the two-hour JavaFX introduction talk I gave recently.

That’s that for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – it’s great fun finding and reading what you’re working on. Catch you all next week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 17

by Jonathan Giles | May 16, 2010 | Links

A slightly quieter week this week, but in fact there is a heap of very useful, well-considered posts this week. Be sure to check out the links below as there is plenty of useful information!

• Amy Fowler has blogged about the promotion of the ‘managed’ property from LayoutInfo to Node, and at the same time covers the implication of this move. Well worth reading if you don’t understand what managed / unmanaged nodes are.
• Tor Norbye has done a very useful blog post discussing pixel considerations in Java / JavaFX. Basically, if you’re wondering why your lines look blurred, this post explains why – and how to fix it. If you’re doing anything in JavaFX, you really should read this post.
• Rakesh Menon has shown how to use the preview TreeView control we released in 1.3. You should read this as it shows the alternative way of building a tree on-demand. It’s a very nice feature of the TreeView API.
• Peter Karich has posted a ‘matchstick graph editor‘ on JFXStudio. For others creating fun little apps, in any stage of implementation, please consider posting details about it to JFXStudio – contact me for details.
• Jim Clarke has ported Jim Weaver’s 3D demo I mentioned last week to work on a TV. You can read all about the porting (basically mapping keys to the remote control), and watch a video, on Jim Weaver’s blog.
• Johannes Schneider has posted about ‘Closing the gap between Java and JavaFX‘ by making it easier to bind between JavaFX and Java code. He says that this will eventually end up in the JFXtras project.
• Sten Anderson has released Music Explorer FX 2.0, which has significant improvements over earlier releases.
• I came across the ‘getting started with the JavaFX Composer‘ tutorial this week, and whilst I don’t know it’s age, I thought it might be useful for people wanting to play with this JavaFX RAD plugin for NetBeans.

That’s us for another week. Thanks to everyone for writing these useful posts, and as always please contact me if you think I missed something or should include a link next week. Keep up the hard work folks! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 10

by Jonathan Giles | May 9, 2010 | Links

An absolute tonne of posts this week. It’s great to see that JavaFX is doing well, and that people are so active in improving, growing and supporting the community. Keep it up folks 🙂

• Amy Fowler has put out two blog posts this week at her new website. The first post covers ‘taming the layout beast‘, and in particular details the general rules you should follow when doing layouts in JavaFX 1.3. Her second post covers the changes to auto-sizing in JavaFX 1.3. These are must-read posts for anyone doing JavaFX development.
• The JavaFX documentation team has published a huge article covering all UI controls available in JavaFX. Be sure to use the navigation on the left to browse through the various controls.
• Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein has done a detailed and well-considered post on the performance improvements in the recent JavaFX 1.3 release. This is highly recommended reading in my opinion.
• Here on FXExperience I did an introductory post on a new preview control in JavaFX 1.3: Menus. I also did a brief introduction to how to style them, but there are far better resources available in last weeks links of the week by Dean Iverson.
• Jim Weaver has posted about the 3D features available in JavaFX 1.3. There is plenty of code here for people to sink their teeth into.
• Exadel have released version 1.3 of the JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse, which adds support for JavaFX 1.3.
• Stephen Chin has posted about a new project called Apropos for managing product portfolio planning. The interesting part of this is that the application is written in JavaFX, so it may prove interesting to those keen to understand / develop some best practises around application development in JavaFX.
• Johannes Schneider continues his series of posts related to his explorations of JavaFX. This week he has (only!) three posts titled ‘Analyzing JavaFX‘, ‘Binding PropertyChangeSupport to JavaFX objects transparently‘ and ‘JavaFX Internals Part 2‘.
• The JavaFX team occassionally prowls the forums offering help where we can. This week Stuart Marks helped clarify how you should go about providing custom styles in a stylesheet, and I clarified the changes and implications of changes to ToggleGroup in 1.3.
• William Antônio Siqueira published a Google Translate application written using JavaFX 1.3. You can play with it, and also check out the source code to see how he did things.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about how to integrate JavaFX with Facebook. In particular this weeks post covers authentication.
• Antoine Mischler has posted about creating a custom Axis for the JavaFX chart library so that it is possible to plot logarithmic data easily (and without having to modify the data before showing it in the chart). It’s actually impressive how easy this looks to be.
• I stumbled across a post by the NetBeans team that further introduces and explains the concept of states that they have introduced into the NetBeans Composer tool for JavaFX rapid app development.

I warned you that this was a busy week! I hope that there was something helpful in the bunch of links above that was of particular help and/or interest to you. If I missed something out, or you just want to complain/sing my praises, please either message me on twitter (@JonathanGiles) or email me. Of course, you should also follow the @fxexperience twitter stream for news of when we post new blog posts here.

Right, that’s it for another week. Keep up the hard work folks and I’ll see you all again in a weeks time.