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.
Something that you see more and more with client applications at the moment is embedded map components. This blog will show you how to embed Google, Yahoo or Bing maps in your JavaFX application.
Google Maps in JavaFX 2.0
Download a copy of the application and try it out. The jar file is linked below, just download it and double click. This requires you to have the JavaFX 2.0 beta runtime installed.
One of the things that would be really nice to have in the virtualised ListView and TreeView JavaFX controls, not to mention future controls like TableView, is multiple selection. Certain kinds of apps just can not exist without multiple selection in fact.
So, unsurprisingly, today I got an email from a user of JavaFX, who claims to be a fan of FX Experience (hi Keith!), who was needing multiple selection for his work. I didn’t actually think it could be done very easily (and one of my main jobs is working on these controls, so I should know), but I spent a bit of time looking into it, and it turns out that it’s actually quite possible, with a number of warnings and rough edges, and also the use of a little bit of unpublished API. As long as you’re promising to not tell anyone, I thought I’d share this code….but just with you, so shhh 🙂
Ok, I know we’ve been going on about custom cells / cell factories a bit recently, but I wanted to do one more post about a very useful topic: caching within cell content.
These days ‘Hello World’ has been replaced by building a Twitter client, so I’ve decided to frame this topic in terms of building a Twitter client. Because I don’t actually care about the whole web service side of thing, I’ve neglected to implement the whole ‘real data’ / web services aspect of it. If you want to see an actual running implementation with real data, have a look at William Antônio’s Twitter client, which is using this ListCell implementation.
Yuck, ‘CheckBoxTreeView’ – what a mouthful. Anywho – I was just looking at a very interesting JavaFX session slidedeck from Jazoon presented by AdNovum Informatik AG titled ‘JavaFX – The Condemned Live Longer‘. It is a great slide deck as they are a company that have invested a lot of time researching the available RIA technologies, and they are pretty upfront with what they like and don’t like in JavaFX, and what their developer experience has been.
The MenuButton and SplitMenuButton controls
We recently discussed the new preview Menu control that is part of JavaFX 1.3. Another part of this release is a number of controls that make use of menus internally, and this post talks about two new preview controls that do just this: MenuButton and SplitMenuButton. (more…)
Important Note: Menus (and related classes) are ‘preview’ API in JavaFX 1.3, which means that the API may (and most probably will) change in future releases. However, you’re welcome to make use of these preview controls in 1.3. Read on to learn how.
Up until the release of JavaFX 1.3 it was not possible to build proper menus that ‘popped’ out of the Stage, as one expects a menu to do. It was not until we were able to expose other functionality internally that creating proper menus became possible. As already warned, in JavaFX 1.3 menus are preview controls whilst we firm them up and get feedback from the community. In this post I wanted to outline the API, and what options you have for styling them using nothing more than CSS.
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FX Experience is maintained by Jonathan Giles.
