JavaFX links of the week, June 24

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 23, 2013 | Links

Hi all – a number of interesting posts this week – enjoy! 🙂

• The AquaFX project this week announced the release of AquaFX 0.1. AquaFX is a project by Claudine Zillmann to reproduce Mac OS X ‘Aqua’ visuals in JavaFX as a CSS file, so that JavaFX applications can appear as native Mac OS X applications.
• Gerrit Grunwald has two posts this week. Firstly, he has another post on ‘taming the Nashorn‘ project, which is a JavaScript engine coming in JDK 8. The nice thing about doing JavaFX development in JavaScript is that he does not have to recompile his code between edits as the JavaScript is interpreted. This is really  beneficial when it comes to development on a Raspberry Pi. In his second post, Gerrit has done a ‘Tuesday fun’ post about image rollover effects in JavaFX.
• With the release of Java 7u25 and JavaFX 2.2.25 this week, the Java documentation team has put out a number of new documents. Most notable for JavaFX developers is the new documentation for the JavaFX FileChooser component.
• I was informed this week that the DromblerFX project includes a docking framework, which may be of interest to some developers. Drombler FX is a modular Rich Client Platform for JavaFX based on OSGi and Maven (POM-first).
• Thierry Wasyl has posted some sample code on how to create a ListValueFactory for TableView.
• Sean Phillips continues his work on integrating the JavaFX Accordion control into the NetBeans platform.
• mihosoft has posted a tool that might be useful to people testing out JDK 8 (and JavaFX 8.0) – it’s called JSelect and allows for easy switching between JDKs.

That’s all folks! 🙂 Catch you all next week.

JavaFX links of the week, June 17

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 16, 2013 | Links

Another week, another bunch of links. Enjoy! 🙂

• Jide Software released three blog posts giving a good overview of some of the new controls / libraries that are in their new JideFX beta release. This includes formatted TextFields, decoration pane, and validation support. If you’re building JavaFX applications you really should check out what the community is starting to make available. For reference, you might want to check out JideFX, JFXtras and ControlsFX.
• José Pereda has a long and detailed post on integrating the Leap Motion Controller with JavaFX (and interacting with 3D models by waving his hand over his desk).
• Gerrit Grunwald has posted screenshots and details of his work on getting his JavaFX code running on iOS.
• Narayan Maharjan has a post about lights in JavaFX 3D.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has a post detailing his findings on integrating JavaFX and Swing code in a single application.
• Geertjan Wielenga has a post titled “JavaFX WebView & JavaFX HTMLEditor: A Tale of Two Cities“. In short, he has extended the JavaFX HTMLEditor control to “search through all the text prior to rendering and uses the file protocol to locally locate images and CSS”. This allows for the HTMLEditor control to show pictures within the editor window, something it does not currently support (but for which RT-30486 already exists).
• Carl Dea has published the source code for his JavaFX 8.0 KeyholeWidget control.
• Cédric Champeau has published code that converts a deck.js slide deck to PDF by using JavaFX WebView to render each slide and then output a PDF containing the render of all slides.

Catch you all next week!

JavaFX links of the week, June 10

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 9, 2013 | Links

A relatively quiet week this week, but a couple of open source projects continue to keep the community momentum moving forward. Let’s get right into it! 🙂

• Richard Bair announced the beginning of a ‘performance tips and tricks‘ wiki page to track performance ideas and details of the JavaFX infrastructure. This document is intended to be fluid as new areas are discovered and explored.
• JIDE Software (purveyors of fine Swing UI components) have announced the beta release of JideFX, a collection of libraries (some open source (LGPL+classpath), some commercial) that contain a number of JavaFX UI controls and other useful libraries.
• I announced the release of ControlsFX 8.0.0 final, which includes a bunch of improvements to dialogs and other new API. This release was once again a team effort, with a substantial percentage of the development by other team members, most notably Eugene Ryzhikov, but also thanks must go to Danno Ferrin and Hendrik Ebbers for their contributions too. As always ControlsFX is available under the BSD license.
• William Antônio has put up a blog post about developing the server side of a JavaFX CRUD application.
• ScalaFX 1.0.0 Milestone 4 was released recently. If you’re interested in building JavaFX applications in Scala,  you should definitely check this project out!

Catch you all in a weeks time!

JavaFX links of the week, June 3

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 2, 2013 | Links

June already?! The months are racing by these days! That’s the problem with always having your head down coding – the seasons change and you barely notice.

• Daniel Zwolenski released an alpha release of the JavaFX Maven Plugin 2.0, and he is seeking feedback. If you’re interested in JavaFX and Maven, it would be great for you to go to the blog, test out the software and give the feedback Daniel is seeking!
• Gerrit Grunwald has posted on ‘taming the Nashorn‘. For those unfamiliar with Nashorn (pronounced nas-horn, not nash-horn), it is a brand new JavaScript engine included in Java 8.0. Gerrit’s blog post shows how to write JavaFX applications in JavaScript, and have them appear as desktop applications. It’s very cool to see JavaFX being programmed in all kinds of interesting JVM-based languages (including Groovy, Scala and Ruby as well).
• Steven Van Impe has a blog post about JavaFX properties in JPA entity classes. As Steven puts it, “This past week, the following question came to mind: can I use JavaFX properties in domain classes that have to be persisted using JPA? That is: can I build domain classes that use JavaFX properties instead of regular properties, yet are persistable like regular JPA entity classes? After a bit of trial and error, I came up with the following answer: it’s actually pretty easy, if you understand JPA’s property access.”
• Speaking of JPA, Graham Smith has started a series of posts on ‘JavaFX 2 with JPA 2 and Drag and Drop’. So far he has posted part one and part two.
• Sean Phillips has posted on creating a JavaFX Accordion Toolbar for the NetBeans Platform.

Catch you all next week 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 27

by Jonathan Giles | May 26, 2013 | Links

JavaFX links of the week, May 20

by Jonathan Giles | May 19, 2013 | Links

Welcome to another weeks worth of links. I should note that I’m back in New Zealand after a week in the US, and I was a little distracted last week, so some links may have slipped through the cracks. Sorry if I miss anybodies hard work! 🙂

• Probably the biggest news of the past week was that Niklas Therning has managed to get JavaFX running on iOS devices by combining OpenJFX with Apache Harmony and RoboVM.
• Tom Schindl has made available builds of Eclipse that work with Java 8, which is really useful for anyone developing JavaFX now that it has switched to depending on some Java 8 features and API. I intend to switch back to Eclipse ASAP.
• Gerrit Grunwald has once again updated his validation UI feedback API, improving it to not draw validation feedback for invisible fields.
• Speaking of Gerrit, he has also posted a new (JavaFX 2.x) toggle button control.
• Danno Ferrin has released version 0.3.0 of the JavaFX Gradle Plugin. As he says in the post, “new in this release is the ability to specify a particular JVM to package with your native bundles and the ability to customize platform-specific build options. Some configuration options and conventions also moved around to support these two features, most notably the plugin no longer automatically self-signs the code.”
• Hendrik Ebbers has posted part two of his series on ‘designing JavaFX business applications‘. This post discusses the limitations of FXML, and makes a proposal on how to improve this.
• Sean Phillips has been working on a ‘JavaFX Accordion slide-out menu for the NetBeans Platform‘.
• The Canoo blog has a post on AfterburnerDolphin, which is (rather obviously) a combination of the AfterBurner.fx project by Adam Bien and the OpenDolphin project by Canoo.
• Granite Data Services 3.0.0.M2 is out and available for download here, and you can read the announcement on their website.
• Robert Ladstätter has posted on 2D Image Filters with OpenCV and JavaFX.
• Asko K has put up a small code snippet to test out JavaFX 3D features (in his case specifically on Mac OS X).

That’s all this week. Catch you again next week!

JavaFX links of the week, May 12

by Jonathan Giles | May 11, 2013 | Links

This weeks post is a day early, as I’ll be traveling to the US this afternoon for meetings and such. Due to this, the number of links this week is a little lower than usual. I imagine next weeks post will be far bigger. Nonetheless, there is still plenty of reading and learning for you from the links this week. Enjoy 🙂

• Hendrik Ebbers has two posts this week. Firstly, he talks about the ‘aquatecture‘ of the AquaFX project (which is a project to create a Mac OS X look for JavaFX). Secondly, he has the first post in a series about designing JavaFX business applications. This post focuses on the JavaFX middleware layer, and in particular he calls out DataFX, RedFX and OpenDolphin. Future posts will cover the client side and other areas.
• Angela Caicedo, a Java evangelist at Oracle, was interviewed at Devoxx UK about her work on user interface development using Raspberry PI and JavaFX.
• Jim Laskey has blogged about writing JavaFX applications in JavaScript (on top of Nashorn).
• I announced the availability of a new project called ControlsFX, which not surprisingly is a collection of JavaFX UI controls (dialogs, button bars, grid views, etc) designed for JavaFX 8.0 and above.
• Gerrit Grunwald has announced a JavaFX BBQ at his place in June. If you’re in the area, he’s got all the details on his blog.
• Sri kalyan posted a blog post on his FXTalk project, which is a JavaFX-based gtalk / Jabber client.
• Carl Dea has posted the code for his WebcamFX project to GitHub.

That’s all folks! Catch you again next week after I return from the US.