JavaFX links of the week, March 22

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 21, 2010 | Links

Only a few interesting links this week, all included below. Perhaps most interesting is the NetBeans team work on integrating JavaFX code within a NetBeans RCP application.

• Geertjan Wielenga has posted about work the NetBeans platform developers are undertaking to make it possible to embed JavaFX inside NetBeans applications (i.e. built above the RCP).
• Sten Anderson has released the source code for a JavaFX family tree visualiser and a tag visualiser.
• Jim Weaver has updated the JavaFX RIA challenge by changing the deadline to be 30 days after the release of JavaFX 1.3.
• Patrick Champion has continued his series of posts on JPA 2.0 and JavaFX. I’m very, very pleased to see more focus is going on JavaFX breaking into the enterprise. The number of JavaOne proposals I reviewed in this area was staggering, which is, again, very, very pleasing.
• Antoine Mischler has a post talking about how to unit test your JavaFX application using JFrog and Maven. Within Oracle we just directly use JUnit for testing purposes, and that tends to work very well.

Hope you learnt something new this week 🙂 As always, email me any links you may have, and I’ll be back again next week.

JavaFX links of the week, March 15

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 14, 2010 | Links

Not a huge number of links this week in the JavaFX camp, but what we do have below are some very interesting articles in a number of diverse areas. I hope you find them interesting, and as always, please email me any links you would like to have included.

• The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group have announced the next talk to be on April 14 by Stuart Marks, a member of the JavaFX UI Controls team (and therefore a teammate of ours). This will be a very good talk as Stuart is very articulate and precise when answering questions and delving into details.
• JavaFX.com have updated two documents this week: Their article on ‘Shape Intersection, Subtraction, and Union‘ and their tech-tip on ‘Localizing your JavaFX application‘.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about how to layout user interfaces in JavaFX.
• Jeff Frieson has posted about creating his painter’s canvas for mobile devices.
• Max Katz has written about JavaFX and Seam with Flamingo. This article shows how Flamingo letts you easily connect JavaFX with Seam or Spring back-ends.
• Antoine Mischler has posted about how to ‘spice up your JavaFX application with Maven‘.

That’s us for another week. Keep up the great work everyone, and we’ll do our best to keep linking to it.

JavaFX links of the week, March 8

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 7, 2010 | Links

Who would have thought it – I just uncovered another bunch of JavaFX links! Of particular interest to many might be the interview that Oracle did with Nandini Ramani, where she outlines the plans for JavaFX in more detail. Of course, that’s not all the community has in store for you this week – so let’s get right into the news (so I don’t have to keep thinking of something to say 🙂 ).

• Nandini Ramani was interviewed this week on the Oracle Technology Network to discuss the future of JavaFX.
• Stephen Chin did a good blog post discussing the options to open urls in JavaFX in the users web browser.
• Don’t forget that the next Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group is right on our doorstep – it’s on March 10, and as per usual can be attended virtually as well as in Real Life. This months talk is shared with the Silicon Valley Web JUG, which will be talking about the Java Store as well as JFrog Artifactory.
• JavaFX.com has put up two new/updated posts titled ‘Creating a Digital Clock‘ and ‘Shape Intersection, Subtraction and Union‘.
• Exadel have released a new version of their open source JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse, taking the version to 1.2.2.
• The Java Persistency API has had some attention this week, firstly with Patrick Champion blogging about ‘JavaFX and the Databases with JPA 2.0‘, and secondly with Matt Warman stating that JavaFX + JPA = Awesome.
• Rakesh Menon did two posts this week. Firstly he discusses deployment in JavaFX , and secondly he has written a new ‘Carousel’ container.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has posted another video of his JavaFX/Swing mashup application that shows off pan and zoom functionality.
• Enrique Oriol wrote a Rubik’s cube game in JavaFX that looks fairly impressive.

As always, thanks to the people sending in links, it’s always fascinating to see what the community is doing. Keep up the hard work and I’ll see you again in a weeks time.

JavaFX links of the week, March 1

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 28, 2010 | Links

Another week, another bunch of JavaFX links. It was a relatively quiet week this week in the JavaFX-sphere, but there is still a few good links which I’ve included below.

• The JavaFX community is a nice tight-knit group of enthusiasts and developers. Whilst we mostly keep in touch via twitter, we all worry about the people who aren’t part of the twitter community, and who may feel lost and isolated when learning JavaFX. Well, now that JavaFX is an Oracle product, we also mingle in Oracle Mix. Join us if you want to ask questions or just discuss JavaFX.
• The JavaFX Composer team (a NetBeans plugin developed at Sun/Oracle which makes building JavaFX-based graphical forms easier) have started a new blog to publicise their progress as they work towards a final release. Everything I’ve heard from people using it is that it is a great tool, and very, very useful for building quality JavaFX-based software.
• Simon Morris has posted the second tutorial on his website, covering FXD manipulation.
• Rakesh Menon has blogged about some recommended performance optimisations when developing JavaFX applications. These are all very good tips, so do take a moment to make sure you’re aware of them. He plans to maintain this post with similar advice for JavaFX 1.3.
• In another blog post, Rakesh shows off his results from using the JavaFX Composer tool to build a JavaFX-based user interface.
• Drew continues his work on a JavaFX game using Phys2D. This week he updated the graphics, and also added some effects to his game.
• I happened upon this website recently, which is just a single (but rather long) page outlining all of the JavaFX Script syntax. It seems like a very good reference for anyone new to the language.

That’s us for another week. Catch you again next week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, February 22

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 21, 2010 | Links

A lot of good links this week in the JavaFX-sphere. It’s interesting to read the fun that people are having with JavaFX, as well as the controversy of people who don’t quite get JavaFX and it’s relevance. Personally, I think people should continue to discuss their thoughts of JavaFX, but by no means should they write it off just yet – 1.3 is going to be a rocking release and really set the foundation for future releases. Also – give JavaFX a chance, posts like Jonathan Merritts recent post are becoming more frequent as people find hidden delights in JavaFX Script and the API’s being developed.

Anyway – on with the news.

• As I mentioned, it’s been a funny old week in JavaFX-land, with both negative posts and positive posts. Being a good link reporter, I’ll leave you to make up your own mind.
• The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group posted the video for Hinkmond Wong’s ‘Mobile Dojo‘ talk, which I’ve posted on FX Experience in a slightly larger size. You can also see just the slides at Stephen Chin’s blog.
• Richard Bair posted about text transitions following a recent bout of bug triage, where he encountered a requested feature which he’s putting back out to the community to try and solve. This is something we occassionally encounter – deciding whether we should develop something internally or rely on third-parties to develop functionality.
• Details about the JavaFX Composer preview 2 release came online this week. I’m not sure if this coincided with the actual preview 2 release or not. JavaFX Composer is a plugin for NetBeans that makes it easy to build JavaFX-based user interfaces (although it’s intended for developers moreso than designers, who should use the forthcoming Authoring Tool being developed at Oracle).
• Jonathan Merritt decided to use the JavaFX Charting API to roughly predict when he believes the JavaFX 1.3 release will be. He notes that it was more of a chance to play with the chart components (and linear regression models) than anything else, and he is not in a position to actually know the release date – so take it for what it is. Also, note that his chart can only report on the public issues in the JavaFX bug tracker.
• Geeky coder (I’m assuming that’s not his/her real name) posted a JavaFX tip titled ‘Reducing development time by running JavaFX application using class file and with JRebel‘.
• Jan Goyvaerts posts his thoughts on implementing the Observer pattern in JavaFX.

That’s all folks. Keep on playing/working with JavaFX and, if you have a website, posting about your experiences with JavaFX. As always, I encourage you to email me, or talk to me on Twitter. You can find us at @fxexperience, and personally at @richardbair, @jasperpotts, and @jonathangiles.

JavaFX links of the week, February 15

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 14, 2010 | Links

A heap of JavaFX links this week. It’s great to see more and more chatter going on in twitter and other places related to JavaFX. It feels like people are becoming more excited about what is available now, and what is coming up in JavaFX 1.3. Here’s the links for the past week – I hope you enjoy them!

• Lukas Hasik has noted that NetBeans 6.8 Patch 1 has been released. This release includes 36 fixes in the JavaFX area.
• A new article was posted on JavaFX.com that discusses how to profile JavaFX applications using NetBeans.
• In the Sun Developer Network, another article has appeared, titled ‘Java Applets, ASP.net – Can you play together?’. No prizes for guessing the topic of this post.
• Jim Conners has posted a good article titled ‘JavaFX, Sockets and Threading: Lessons Learnt‘.
• Thomas Butter emailed me to let me know of his project to display Open Document Presentation files in JavaFX. It’s only an early preview at the moment, but shows real promise.
• Drew has a small update to his game project where he introduces a pause feature, and explains how he integrated it.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has a post which shows off his integration of JavaFX and Swing into a single application.
• Max Katz has a post showing off his work in using JavaFX as a visual display language for JSF pages.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about the download service listener feature that was part of the Java 1.6.0_18 release. As he notes, “it allows you to provide a Custom Progress UI using AWT/Swing/Java2D APIs. It has callback methods which will provide information related to download and validation of resources.”
• Jonathan Merritt posted about his experience in getting to know JavaFX, and his eventual realisation that JavaFX is very good.
• Following my mention of the need for more Keyboard Cat JavaFX applications, Simon Morris (author of the JavaFX in Action book) obliged and posted another demo which will draw ripples over a video when you click the mouse.
• kdgregory has a post discussing parts of the JavaFX language that he finds interesting.

That’s us for another week. Catch you all same bat time, same bat channel next week.