FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only
I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!
tl;dr: Follow me on Twitter and check for the latest news on JonathanGiles.net.
![Win $2000 in RIA Exemplar Challenge]()
by Jasper Potts | Oct 12, 2009 | Controls, Links, UI Design
Create an application in JavaFX that exemplifies the appearance and behavior of a next-generation enterprise RIA (rich internet application)
See the official announcement for more details on the rules etc. Announcing the JavaFXpert RIA Exemplar Challenge
Announcing the JavaFXpert RIA Exemplar Challenge
I will be judging the entries for their visual design with the help of fellow graphics judge Romain Guy. To help all the designers entering here are a couple of the original designs for the Caspian theme along with links to the photoshop files they were created with. This way you can see the how all the all the controls visuals are contracted using vector shapes and layer effects.
Download Controls.PSD.ZIP
Download Controls Mockup.PSD.ZIP
I also thought maybe some links to sites with good articles on design might be helpful. Most of these are associated with Web Design rather than Application User Interface Design but there is a large amount of cross over and I have not found any good sites on Application User Interface myself.
Here are a few links for inspiration:
by Jasper Potts | Sep 17, 2009 | Layout, Links
Amy Fowler the layout guru has written a excelent article on layout in JavaFX 1.2, recomended reading for anyone working with or learning JavaFX.
JavaFX’s powerful scene-graph and animation engine enables gamer types to rapidly create dynamic visual scenes that are functionally expressed through binding and triggers and timelines. On the other, it’s growing controls and charts libraries clearly stake out a more traditional GUI turf. As interfaces finally graduate to the 21st century, the lines between these two worlds is blurring in exciting ways. Our challenge is to evolve the FX platform to support this convergence, which speaks precisely to why layout in JavaFX is complicated enough that it requires a blog series to explain.
by Jasper Potts | Jun 10, 2009 | Charts, Links
Another good blog post was published today by Dean Iverson on JavaFX Charts.
The chart components included in JavaFX give developers an easy way to let the users of their applications visualize a wide variety of data. There are six kinds of charts supported in JavaFX 1.2:
Creating Charts in JavaFX
by Richard Bair | Jun 9, 2009 | API Design, General, Links
A nice little set of articles by Henry Zhang and Jim Weaver at O’Reilly’s InsideRia.com detail how Zhang wrote a PacMan game in FX. From the article:
When I was young I was fascinated by arcade games. One of my favorites was the Pac-Man game. Recently, when I was learning the JavaFX language, I decided to write the game in JavaFX. Based on my experience in other programming languages, I assumed there would be some amount of work in building a game such as Pac-Man, giving me a good feel for RIA development in JavaFX.
A quick perusal reveals at least one no-no that we should document better: never subclass the Shape classes. They weren’t meant to be subclassed, and if JavaFX Script gave us “final” we’d have used it. Rather, use a CustomNode. The only three Node classes in JavaFX 1.2 that were intended to be subclassed were CustomNode, Control, and Container.
I’m not sure anything bad will happen to you if you subclass one of the shapes, maybe we’ll relax this restriction in the future. Primarily, we just never intended this usage. But hey, sometimes the best things aren’t intended! Its great to see some detailed examples coming out about JavaFX, can’t wait to see more!
