JavaFX links of the week, February 8

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 7, 2010 | Links

The main news out this week was the availability of a maintence release of JavaFX 1.2, taking the version number up to 1.2.3.  Other than that, there have been a number of interesting posts by people exploring physics-based software and using ‘advanced’ features of JavaFX such as clipping. I hope you find these links useful, and as always please feel free to email me any links you think might be useful to include here.

• JavaFX 1.2.3 was released this week. It’s a maintenance release only (which means there are no new toys to play with). This release had a focus on improving performance, reliability, and download time. Various bugs have been fixed as well.
• Long time employee of Sun, and great advocate of both Swing and JavaFX, Josh Marinacci, has announced that he is moving on from Sun/Oracle, taking up a position at Palm.
• Simon Morris has posted an interesting tutorial on how to do advanced clipping in JavaFX. Clipping is something that becomes useful once you understand how to use it, so I recommend finding time to read this article.
• Drew from Piliq.com continues his exploration intophysics-based games. This week he posted progress in adding parallax scrolling and custom cursors, and also an entirely new demo game.
• Speaking of physics games, Mikhail Gorshenev has posted a fun version of Tetris that spices up the original game by requiring you to simply have two or more blocks of the same colour touch. The kicker? The blocks now exhibit physical properties and fall accordingly.
• Alex Ruiz has posted a new release of his FEST JavaFX Maven plugin, bumping the version to 1.0 alpha 1. This is a Maven plugin for compiling JavaFX source files.
• Vyacheslav Baranov writes about the availability (or not, depending on which OS your software is running on) of Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) support in JavaFX 1.2.
• Rakesh Menon has posted sample code to illustrate how to upload files using JavaFX.
• Kon at Outrospective.org has posted an overview of the JavaFX 1.2 charting features.

That’s it for another week. Keep up the hard work people – it’s great to see the growing enthusiasm for JavaFX, especially on your blogs, and on twitter. By the way, the FX Experience team all have twitter accounts, as well as one for this website. You can find us at @fxexperience, and personally at @richardbair, @jasperpotts, and @jonathangiles.

JavaFX links of the week, February 1

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 31, 2010 | Links

It goes without saying that this weeks big news item was of course the Sun acquisition, and the subsequent webcast by Oracle to outline the plans ahead for JavaFX. From the webcast it seems pretty clear that JavaFX has got a lot of support within Oracle, who plan to invest heavily in it in the coming months and years.

Here’s the most useful JavaFX links from the past week.

• Jim Weaver sums up the Oracle news this week nice and succinctly: ‘We will invest heavily in JavaFX‘.
• The JavaFX tutorial has been updated to include a gentler introduction to data binding and triggers, with a new chapter devoted exclusively to “the basics”. Also, apparently there are plans to include a more advanced article discussing this topic also.
• Want tabs in your JavaFX application? Well, today’s your lucky day as toumaille has posted exactly this. His tabbed pane control appears to be well thought out, and may be of use to people out there, certainly until there is an official tab control in JavaFX.
• Drew, carrying on his investigation into JavaFX and physics, has put up a JavaFX applet of a very, very simple platform game using real physics.
• Exadel released a new version of their JavaFX Plug-In for Eclipse, taking it up to version 1.2.1.
• Jim Weaver introduces an interesting visualisation developed in JavaFX by Nik Silver. You can go directly to the visualisation if you are interested in playing with it.
• Simon Morris has put up a page that contains all of the demos he wrote whilst writing his book ‘JavaFX in Action’.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has written about how he has embedded a JavaFX scene into a Swing application.
• Krishna Kishore has created a JavaFX application that grows/animates flowers onto the screen. It’s a rather nice effect, and shows the power of the language given Krishna admits creating this program just to learn the language.

JavaFX links of the week, January 25

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 24, 2010 | Links

Well, I best start this week by mentioning that the Oracle takeover of Sun is edging very near. The EU appears to now be happy with things, and the word is that China’s and Russia’s competition bodies are now looking it all over. Of most interest for those of us in the JavaFX world will be the 5 hour (!) webcast being given this week by Oracle. The presentation is on Wednesday 27th January, 9:00am – 2:00pm Pacific time. You can register for it, and find out more, here.

Now, on with this weeks most relevant news.

• There is an opening in the JavaFX team for a rich-text expert. Check it out if you’re interested.
• Amy Fowler’s talk to the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group is now available for you to view online. The audio is a little poor at the start, but it gets better after about 10 minutes.
• Drew has continued his research into integrating physics engines into JavaFX.
• Java Champion Adam Bien was interviewed by Sun to discuss his thoughts on JavaFX. Overall it is an interesting discussion.
• A small section of Simon Morris’ book ‘JavaFX in Action’ has been edited and published online. It covers how to develop classes in JavaFX, which I’m sure a number of people will find useful.
• Another contribution by Simon Morris is a ‘wipe library’, which he has provided an example application for. I had to include it for the keyboard cat reference. I think programming demos would be better with more keyboard cats.
• Johan Vos has blogged about a JavaFX chat application designed for use by focus groups.

That’s it folks – catch you in a weeks time!

JavaFX links of the week, January 18

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 17, 2010 | Links

Wow! A great week of links this week, with a number of interesting reads, some interesting code, and another upcoming JavaFX talk coming up real soon now. Here’s the links of the past week:

• Richard Bair posted a very simple SplitView ‘control’ for JavaFX that you can easily reuse in your JavaFX applications. It’s not fully-fledged like it would be once it’s developed properly by Sun (so it isn’t skinable, etc), but it can be easily modified to meet your specific needs in the short term.
• JavaFX.com has let me know that they’ve put up a number of new and updated how-to’s. This is a great resource for people new to JavaFX.
• With the second Silicon Valley JavaFX presentation by Amy Fowler now behind us, we have the third one coming up in only a few weeks: it’s Hinkmond Wong who will be giving detailed talk on the state of the art in the mobile landscape. If you are interested in mobile development, this event will give you the answers.
• Simon Morris has updated his JavaFX Wipe Library, which is a collection of transition effects (think Powerpoint slide changing effects – fades, slides, reveals, flip, etc, etc).
• Drew has posted a tutorial on how he created a ‘photo drop‘ application in JavaFX which makes use of Phys2D. It’s not the first time I’ve seen Phys2D used in JavaFX, with Richard Bair and Jasper Potts having used it in their Devoxx game, and Simon Morris using it for some demos as well.
• Eric Warriner has created a mashup using the National Public Radio and Google Maps APIs (and 125 lines of JavaFX code) to translate a given zip code to show all available NPR stations.
• Mitchell Pronschinske has a short interview with Lukas Hasik regarding the Netbeans Composer plugin for designing JavaFX user interfaces visually.
• Max Katz, on the Exadel blog, has announced that version 1.2 of the Exadel JavaFX plugin for Eclipse has been released.
• Tom Eugelink has posted a comprehensive post discussing developing JavaFX code using Eclipse.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about printing in JavaFX (through using what is available in AWT).
• Alexandr Scherbatiy has posted some code he wrote in JavaFX that generates fractals.

I hope that there were some useful links in there for you. Please feel free to email me (jonathan@jonathangiles.net) if you have anything you want to have linked to in a future posting. Until next week – have a great week ahead, and keep up the great work 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, January 11

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 10, 2010 | Links

Only a few links this week – it seems everyone is still thawing out (in the northern hemisphere anyway – it’s nice and summery down here in New Zealand where I live). So, this week we had four interesting posts:

• The JavaFX team has put out two new articles this week, entitled ‘Easy Animations With the Animated Transitions‘ and ‘Create a Secure JavaFX Application‘.
• The JavaFX team also put out an update to the JavaFX plugin for Eclipse, which brings a bunch of new features since the last release came out in June 2009.
• toumaille has posted a JavaFX level indicator, which may prove to be very useful for some people.

Catch you all again in a weeks time.

JavaFX links of the week, January 4

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 3, 2010 | Links

Welcome to the first posting of 2010. This week there has been an incredibly small number of posts, so this is a very short post.

JavaFX

• Jeff Frieson has blogged about how he created his Happy Holidays JavaFX application, which won the most recent JavaFX coding competition.
• Carl Dea has created a poor man’s form designer, and provided both an overview as well as the souce code. By his own admission this is really just him playing around, but who knows, if you like it perhaps you can help grow this into a useful application.

That’s it – short and sweet. It’s good to see too – it means you’re all enjoying your holidays 🙂 Catch you next week!