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.
by Jonathan Giles | May 11, 2014 | Links
A great line up of links this week, which shows how strong and vibrant our little community is. Keep up the great work folks, it is always fascinating reading about what you’re doing!
- Tom Schindl has two posts this week. Firstly, he has a post detailing how to reuse your e4 SWT-Part implementation in e4 on JavaFX. Secondly, he has a post announcing that the e(fx)clipse all-in-one downloads have been upgraded to Luna M7, and this brings with it some usability enhancements.
- Johan Vos has a post about location-based software in JavaFX, and in particular the OpenMapFX library.
- Johan was also interviewed for Java Magazine, on the topic of JavaFX on Android.
- Marco Jakob has updated his entire tutorial series for JavaFX 8, detailing all the new functionality, as well as improved ways to use old API now that we have lambdas, etc. This is well worth reading.
- James Denvir has blogged ‘one bean to bind them all‘ – a post looking at using JavaFX properties on the server side.
- Jens Deters continues to improve his JavaFX-based MQTT FX application, for publishing / subscribing to MQTT topics. It is very nicely polished, and makes use of ControlsFX 🙂
- Florian Brunner has announced that Drombler FX version 0.3 has been released. With this release the Docking Framework and the Context Framework have been moved from the OSGi-based RCP Drombler FX to the Drombler Commons library collection, which can be used inside and outside of an OSGi platform.
- Gerrit Grunwald updated his NeoPixel blog post to mention that he has now created a NeoPixel 60 JavaFX visualisation as well. He also posted a video of a ‘paper fold’ effect he coded this week.
- The tomoTaka blog has a post showing a simple WebView-based sample app.
- Nathan Howard has posted about how to change the cursor in JavaFX to a custom cursor.
- The ReportMill blog has a short post about running PacMan in SnapCode with Greenfoot.
- This week the ControlsFX project asked the community for help translating it to other languages. If you have a spare 15 minutes and are willing to help translate from English to another language, please go to the ControlsFX i18n wiki page to see if there is a translator signed up or not. Regardless of whether there is or not, if you remain interested, please follow the instructions to contact me. Thanks!
Catch you all next week! 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | May 4, 2014 | Links
Surprise surprise – you folks are all hard at work on JavaFX blog posts! Keep it up, it’s always great to read what you’re all doing! 🙂
- Tomas Mikula continues to post about his interesting ReactFX library, this week he discusses ReactFX’s general stream combinator: State Machine.
- Gerrit Grunwald has two posts this week. Firstly, he has a brief post to announce that Enzo, his JavaFX component library, is available via Maven. Secondly, he has created a NeoPixel24 Ring representation in JavaFX using the Canvas node.
- Marco Jakob has three good posts this week, providing details on JavaFX 8 TableView sorting and filtering, JavaFX 8 event handling examples, and JavaFX TableView cell renderers.
- Rob Terp has a blog post about GMapsFX, a project that allows you to add Google maps to your JavaFX application. This is done using the JavaFX WebView component, with Java code being written to call into the JavaScript of Google Maps.
- Christoph Nahr has two posts this week. Firstly, he has a post about ListView text alignment (in particular, in relation to having multiple ‘columns’ of data in each ListCell). Secondly, he has a post about simulating Platform.runAndWait, which is API that is not shipped in JavaFX as it can lead to frozen UIs when used incorrectly (which is almost always).
- Steven Van Impe has posted part two of his series on JavaFX game loops.
- Falko Riemenschneider has a post about applying Clojure core.async to JavaFX.
- Jens Deters has posted a video of his MQTT FX application, which is a JavaFX application designed to publish and subscribe to MQTT topics.
- IDR Solutions have posted a video tutorial for their NetBeans/JavaFX PDF plugin
Catch you all next week.
by Jonathan Giles | Apr 27, 2014 | Links
Heaps of links – enjoy! 🙂
Keep up the great work – catch you all next week!
by Jonathan Giles | Apr 20, 2014 | Links
Hi all. It’s a public holiday here in New Zealand today, so I’m going to rush this post out so that I can get back to spending time with my family. Enjoy!
- Gerrit Grunwald has two posts this week. Firstly, he has ported yet another of his Swing ‘SteelSeries’ gauges to JavaFX – this time it is the altimeter control. Because of this, Gerrit has announced a new small project called AirSeries, which are his JavaFX-based gauges for JavaFX. Secondly, he has created a FlipPanel control, which, as the name suggests, allows for a panel that can have content on both its front and back, and which can be flipped (in an animated fashion) to reveal the other side of the panel.
- JosĂ© Pereda has written RubikFX, which is a JavaFX application that uses the 3D graphics functionality to solve the Rubik’s Cube puzzle.
- Johan Vos has published a YouTube video showing off JavaFX on Android, using a Nexus 5 phone to read NFC cards. It is great to see all the effort that Johan and others have been putting into JavaFX on Android paying off!
- Hendrik Ebbers has announced the release of DataFX 8 Preview 2. Release notes are available to understand the changes.
- Dirk Lemmermann has posted his third JavaFX tip, which is to use the JavaFX Callback interface rather than creating your own custom interfaces.
- Nathan Howard has a posted on how to set up key combinations in JavaFX to use as accelerators in menus. Personally I prefer to use the form KeyCombination.keyCombination(“Shortcut+C”), as it is a little less verbose (and still cross platform – ‘shortcut’ will map to ctrl on Windows and cmd on Mac.
- Version 8.0 of Jubula and GUIdancer has been released with support for JavaFX applications.
- Jeff Martin has updated SnapCode (the IDE and RAD tool for education, entertainment and the enterprise), to add hit detection and more.
- William AntĂ´nio Siqueira has posted a port of his sentiments app post last week to use nashorn and JavaScript this week (as well at JavaFX, of course).
That’s us for another week. Catch you all next week, and keep up the great work folks! 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Apr 13, 2014 | Links
Another week, another bunch of links. Enjoy! 🙂
Catch you all next week 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Apr 6, 2014 | Links
I’m going to be away from my computer for all of tomorrow, so here’s the JavaFX links from the past week, roughly 12 hours early! Enjoy 🙂
- Gerrit Grunwald has posted twice in the past week. Firstly, he created a new gauge called ‘AirCompass‘, which he ported (quickly) from his Swing SteelSeries library. Secondly, he has created a ‘poor mans live editor’ by combining the JavaFX WebView component with the Nashorn JavaScript engine.
- Amrullah has a post about a beta release of TiwullFX 2.0 (for JavaFX 8.0) being available for download and testing. This library is a very good one if you’re doing heavy table-related work (although I’ve not used it myself, I just think the feature set sounds cool).
- Pedro Duque Vieira continues to improve his JMetro style for JavaFX, this time focusing on the Slider control. I’ve not really looked into Metro styling at all, but it seems to me that the slider fill colour on the vertical sliders appear to be coming out from the wrong side (the top rather than the bottom)? I guess it is hard to judge as the horizontal sliders are all at their zero position, so you can’t see what the fill colour is to the left of the thumb.
- Jens Deters has blogged about using Swing and JavaFX in a single application by using JFXPanel.
- Jeff Martin has updated his SnapCode project to include support for console i/o.
- Simon Lissack has a blog post detailing the many ways in which external stylesheets can be loaded in JavaFX.
- Frank Roth has a blog post about his jSona project mentioned last week (a JavaFX-based music player).
- Bruno Borges has a blog post about his JavaFX version of the 2048 game. The source code is available, and as he notes, he used this project to better learn about a number of things, including lambda expressions, the Stream API, JavaFX 8, JavaFX CSS basics and JavaFX animations.
- SĂ©bastien Bordes has a post about JRebirth (his JavaFX application framework) running on Equinox.
Keep up the great work folks! Catch you all next week! 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Mar 30, 2014 | Links
A huge number of links this week – people really are having fun with JavaFX these days, which is great to see!! 🙂
- Hendrik Ebbers has been very busy! This week there are five links of interest related to Hendrik. Firstly, he has a blog post about his upcoming book ‘Mastering JavaFX 8 Controls‘ (in which I was interviewed). Secondly, he has posted some JavaFX CSS-related utilities (to help reduce the boilerplate when building custom controls). Thirdly, he has a post about reactive programming with JavaFX. Fourthly, he has posted a YouTube video of his interview as part of the nighthacking tour, where he talks about DataFX 8. Fifthly, and finally, he was interviewed by Hartmut Schlosser over at jaxenter about ‘The cutting edge of JavaFX‘.
- Tomas Mikula has blogged about monadic operations on ObservableValue. As he says in his post, “First of all, don’t get scared by the word monadic—it just means that there are a few more operations that treat
null as “value not available.” Anyway, if you have already used Optional, this will all look very familiar.”
- Tom Schindl has posted that e(fx)clipse 0.9.0 has been updated to Kepler SR2. If you’re using e(fx)clipse, you should definitely upgrade!
- Speaking of Tom Schindl, he has also posted an update on his work to get Eclipse running on JavaFX, including a video and a list of the next steps.
- Sean Phillips has posted the source code for his F(X)yz JavaFX 3D visualization library.
- The Ankor app development framework appeared out of the blue this week. It seems to be a framework in a similar vein to OpenDolphin and DataFX.
- Michael Hoffer has been working on an open source app called JavaFXScad, a JavaFX 3D Printing IDE based on JavaCSG.
- Tim Yates has been working on ShadowFX, a Java 8 JavaFX implementation of http://ncase.github.io/sight-and-light/. He posted a video of the result – pretty cool!
- Jens Deters has posted a video of his picmodo application, his “free time project to index pictures with JavaFX”.
- Sven Ruppert has posted part one of his series on Java8 CompletableFuture for JavaFX and CDI.
- Steven Schwenke has open sourced his JavaFX workshop tutorial code.
- Frank Roth has been working on jSona, an open-source JavaFX-based music player.
- Tiancheng Hu has posted a tutorial on “How to make your Android projects more portable to Windows/MacOS (and vice versa)” where he also talks about JavaFX as a frontend.
That’s all for this week – catch you in a weeks time.
by Jonathan Giles | Mar 23, 2014 | Links
Hi all. The big news this week was of course Java 8.0 being released, but that didn’t seem to stop all of you from getting your projects done – there is a heap of interesting news this week! Keep up the great work, and to everyone else, enjoy! 🙂
- As mentioned, Java 8.0 / JavaFX 8.0 was released this week. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this is a major release of JavaFX, bringing with it a heap of new features and bug fixes, having been in development for a very long time! If you haven’t already, you can download JDK 8 from the usual source. Whilst that is downloading, you can learn more about what is new in JavaFX 8.0, or read the JavaFX documentation. There are heaps of features in this release, but some of my (very biased!) favourites include new controls (TreeTableView and DatePicker), UI control support on embedded platforms, print support, 3D support, bi-directional text support, and of course the new Modena stylesheet that is used by default. You can read more detail about the JavaFX features in JDK 8 in the release notes.
- Tom Eugelink has added a new ‘CircularPane’ layout container to the JFXtras project. His blog post is a very interesting read that covers the details of implementing such a layout (to avoid overlapping nodes, for example).
- Tomas Mikula continues to create interesting JavaFX projects! This week he has open sourced his EasyBind project, which “leverages lambdas to reduce boilerplate when creating custom bindings.” Overall it looks like a very useful library for people to investigate using in their projects.
- Speaking of Tomas, he has also done a blog post titled “Trigger processing after a period of inactivity“, which shows how to use ReactFX to defer processing of user input until a specified period of user’s inactivity.
- Michael Berry has blogged about draggable and detachable tabs in JavaFX. This is something I’ve been wanting to do in JavaFX for a very long time, so I’m pleased someone has already done it 🙂 It would be great to see this contributed back to OpenJFX / JFXtras / ControlsFX so that it could be more widely used and tested.
- Adam Bien has announced afterburner.fx version v1.4.4. This release includes support for resource bundles and improved support for mocking.
- Dino Tsoumakis has updated followme.fx, a sample afterburner.fx project for iOS based on Adam Bien’s afterburner.fx.
- Jens Deters has posted a call for people to verify the responsiveness of their applications to different screen / font size configurations, after he found one of his apps rendered poorly.
- Christoph Nahr has released MIME Browser 1.3, a JavaFX-based application for browsing MIME messages that are locally stored in standard EML files.
- Sean Phillips has a video titled “Enhancing NASA Mission Support with JavaFX 8“. The video demonstrates his work with JavaFX, ControlsFX, and NetBeans. Very impressive stuff.
- Mark Stephens has a blog post with some screenshots / information about the new (and commercial) JavaFX-based PDF viewer that IDR Solutions is working on.
- Dirk Lemmermann has released a first early access build of his (commercial) JavaFX-based FlexGanttFX library.
Catch you next week 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Mar 16, 2014 | Links
A heap of links this week – you’ve all been very busy! 🙂
- The JFXtras team has been busily working on getting JFXtras 8.0 out, this week releasing JFXtras 8.0-r1.
- Tom Schindl continues to work on enabling Eclipse to render itself using JavaFX, and the results are starting to look really good (especially given the power of CSS). It’s very cool to see JavaFX being used to render Eclipse!
- Canoo has announced the release of OpenDolphin 0.9. This new release includes a new “push” capability for instant, bi-directional updates and a full-featured OpenDolphin web client for use with HTML5 and JavaScript/TypeScript.
- TESIS DYNAware has released an FBX importer and viewer for JavaFX 8. You can use it to load (binary) FBX files and show the result as a JavaFX 3D mesh.
- TESIS DYNAware has also released their ‘fancy-chart‘ code, which is essentially a JavaFX chart that is linked up with a TableView, such that you can select in one of them to see the relevant information in the other. Very nicely done.
- Tomo Taka has posted a very nice post about JavaFX drag and drop. If you are interested in using drag and drop in your JavaFX application, this is a great summary.
- Jeffrey Guenther has a post making clear how event handling is done in JavaFX, particularly in relation to overlapping sibling nodes.
- Jeff Martin released an updated SnapCode this week with new Play Sound functionality.
- Dirk Lemmermann continues to refine his (commercial) FlexGanttFX project, this week posting videos of agenda editing, gantt chart activity linking, and an example using aircraft / flight scheduling.
- Vasilis Souvatzis has been working on a JavaFX application aimed at dietitians.
That’s all folks. See you next week! 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Mar 9, 2014 | Links
Another week rolls around, and so do a bunch more of your links. Enjoy!
- A colleague of mine in the JavaFX team at Oracle, David Grieve, has started up a new blog. His first post is titled ‘lambda to the rescue‘, and it covers how, with the help of lambdas in Java 8, he is able to write better code in JavaFX.
- Juergen Kress has a post about there now being NetBeans support for JavaFX on iOS.
- I announced, on behalf of the ControlsFX project, that version 8.0.5 was released. This release is a major release with a number of new and useful controls. If you are unfamiliar with ControlsFX, be sure to check out the features page for a high-level summary of all the cool stuff available in ControlsFX.
- There have been new releases of ScalaFX for both JavaFX 2.x and 8.x. If you’re a Scala fan, then you should definitely check this library out.
- Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged about adding ProgressBar support in his JavaFX Metro stylesheet.
- Geertjan Wielenga has interviewed Walter Nyland and Jason Wexbridge on their new book titled ‘NetBeans Platform for Beginners’, and the relevance of the Java desktop.
- Jeff Martin posted an update to SnapCode this week with new Mouse and Keyboard sensing features, new pen graphics features and numerous improvements and fixes.
That’s that for another week. Catch you all next week! 🙂
