JavaFX links of the week, February 4

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 3, 2013 | Links

Hi all – welcome to another weeks worth of links – enjoy! 🙂

• Java 7 7u13 was released this week, and along with this release comes JavaFX 2.2.5. It is highly recommended that everyone upgrade to the latest release as soon as possible.
• Jasper Potts has posted a blog about Modena, the new theme for JavaFX 8.x. I must say that having been watching it develop over the last few months (and giving my 2 cents of feedback) that it is a huge improvement over Caspian, the theme used in JavaFX 1.x and 2.x. Leave your feedback on the blog post about what you like and dislike – it is impossible to please everyone but there is still time to improve things (indeed, there are still things I would like to see changed too!) 🙂
• Danno Ferrin has noted (via his excellent OpenJFX mirror over at bitbucket) that a few very nice new features are starting to appear in the JavaFX 8.0 repositories, including printing API and improved API granularity for embedded support.
• Speaking of Danno, he has blogged about how he has added support for adding application icons with the Gradle JavaFX plugin.
• Dierk König has posted part four of his JavaFX abacus tutorial.
• The Panemu blog has announced the TwiulFX 1.1 is now available for download. TiwulFX provides custom JavaFX components specially designed to work with Java POJO objects. It has 2 main components: TableControl, Form; and also customized column and input components to display a specific data type.
• Patrick Martin has posted Dex Tutorial #7: Java Garbage Collection Analysis. Dex is a visualization application written using JavaFX.
• Arnaud Nouard has blogged about his ‘undecorator‘ tool, which allows you to easily ‘add a better look to your JavaFX stages’.
• Johan Vos is seeking feedback regarding API design in DataFX.
• Andy Till has posted code to allow for easy Region resizing by mouse click and drag. Whilst he states this doesn’t work for UI Controls (as in JavaFX 2.x UI controls didn’t extend from Region), this should work in JavaFX 8.x as UI controls do extend from Region from this release onwards.
• Leon Atherton has blogged about mouse events in JavaFX. This is a good read for anyone new to the event handling system in JavaFX.
• noxxxxo has posted a YouTube video showing a Raspberry Pi running the JME C64 emulator using JavaFX as the rendering technology. You can see the code over at GitHub.

Catch you all in a weeks time 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, January 28

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 27, 2013 | Links

Welcome to the last links for January 2013 – time sure is flying these days! Enjoy 🙂

• Richard Bair announced that some of the SQE tests for JavaFX are now open source, with more on their way soon. These tests are the number one protection we have against functional regressions, so having them out in the public makes it far simpler for third parties to now contribute to OpenJFX.
• JavaFX Scene Builder 1.1 developer preview 18 is now available for download. Check out the release notes to see what is new in Scene Builder 1.1.
• Two new features for JavaFX 8.0 became public this week, including RT-12100 SwingNode support (i.e. embedding Swing components inside JavaFX applications) (see RT-27887 also), and RT-24009: support for Hi-DPI displays.
• Tom Schindl has announced that he has proposed e(fx)clipse to the Eclipse Foundation. You can read the proposal over at eclipse.org if you’re interested in the future of JavaFX tooling and runtime support in Eclipse.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has ported the JFXtras Spinner and Calendar controls to be styled using JMetro.
• Speaking of the JFXtras Spinner control, Ed Thompson has blogged another of his ‘JavaFX from the trenches’ on the JFxtras Spinner control.
• Björn Müller has published a paper on why CaptainCasa  (an open community of mid-range business application software vendors using and developing one common frontend infrastructure for their business applications) has chosen to use JavaFX rather than other technologies like HTML5.
• Thierry Wasyl has blogged about how to set custom fonts in JavaFX. I should also note that Jasper Potts blogged about the same issue in relation to support that was improved in JavaFX 8.0.
• Robert Ladstätter has writing about lightning effects (yes, that isn’t a typo: lightning, not lighting!) 🙂
• Steven Van Impe has written a JavaFX and JPA demo application called Reminders.
• For those of you interested in JRuby and JavaFX, there is a lot of work going on for JRubyFX project over at Github.
• Leon Atherton has blogged about how to set the Z order of nodes in JavaFX.

That’s us for another week. Catch you again in a weeks time! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, January 22

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 21, 2013 | Links

Hi all – welcome to another weeks worth of links! There are a heap of links, so lets get straight into it! 🙂

JavaFX

• Scene Builder 1.1 Developer Preview Build 17 is now available for download!
• Hendrik Ebbers has blogged about how he is working with a student on possibly implementing a Mac OS X native look for JavaFX. He has posted a video of their proof of concept, and it looks very good already.
• Speaking of new CSS styles for JavaFX, Alex Davies-Moore has announced the beginning of a port of the Zurb Foundation style to JavaFX.
• Dierk König has posted part two and three of his JavaFX abacus tutorial. In addition, he has posted a YouTube video demonstrating how Open Dolphin can be used to back client applications written in Swing and JavaFX, and how easy it is to port between the two client libraries.
• The TiwulFX blog has announced the release of version 1.1 RC 1 of their improvements to the JavaFX TableView control.
• Steven Schwenke has blogged about threading issues in JavaFX, related to the game he is developing.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has posted a mockup of a JavaFX calendar styled using JMetro. He is seeking feedback on the design before implementing it. On a side note, a DatePicker control is currently under development for JavaFX 8.0.
• Robert Ladstätter has two posts this week. Firstly, he shows how easy it is to support native drag and drop in JavaFX. Secondly, he has a post about ScalaFX – a DSL for JavaFX in Scala. ScalaFX is actively being developed at scalafx.org.
• Whilst at Devoxx Johan Vos was interviewed about JavaFX and Java EE integration (his area of expertise). In particular, he highlighted projects such as RedFX and DataFX.
• Leon Atherton has announced the availability of a PageFlow PDF viewer mode in their PDF viewing library.

JavaFX & Raspberry Pi

• Simon Ritter has blogged about how to build an SD Card Image For a Raspberry Pi Java Hands On Lab (based on his experience setting up for such a lab at Devoxx last year).
• René Jahn has two posts this week. Firstly, he has blogged about how to get sound working from Java on a Raspberry Pi. Secondly, he posted about how he uses Java and a Raspberry Pi to control the window shutters in his house.

Catch you all next week!

JavaFX links of the week, January 14

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 13, 2013 | Links

Here we go with another weeks worth of links! Enjoy 🙂

JavaFX

• Danno Ferrin has released 0.1.0 of the JavaFX Gradle plugin. This release includes improved Scenic View support.
• Gerrit Grunwald has begun hacking on controls for JavaFX 8.0 (based on the in-development APIs available in the developer preview). You can see his work in his Enzo project.
• Speaking of custom controls, Hendrik Ebbers has put up part three of his ‘Custom UI Controls with JavaFX‘ tutorial.
• Dierk König has posted a good tutorial to help people new to JavaFX learn the basics.
• Speaking of Dierk, he has also posted a YouTube video that demonstrates the OpenDolphin portfolio demo application.
• Marco Jakob has two blog posts this week. Firstly, he has posted about slight improvements he has made to a DatePicker control (originally built by Christian Schudt). Secondly, he highlights the very useful snapshot feature of JavaFX to take screenshots of a running application.
• The Java Source blog has posted three video interviews with Jim Weaver, Gerrit Grunwald, and Martin Gunnarsson / Pär Sikö.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has added CSS styling for the JavaFX ComboBox and ToggleButton controls as part of his JMetro project.
• The TiwulFX blog has posted on how to provide different colours to CSS charts.
• Anton Epple has a long post about writing a tile engine in JavaFX.
• Andy Till continues to improve his EstiMate software estimation tool.
• Leon Atherton has blogged about setting AffineTransform and Font in JavaFX and FXML.
• Thierry Wasyl has shown the text tool he has added to his DrawFX application
• Steven Schwenke has posted about creating hover panes in JavaFX applications for context-specific actions.
• Robert Ladstätter has a number of posts that may be of interest to readers, including ‘Scala JavaFX Archetype‘, ‘Testing with JemmyFX, JavaFX and ScalaTest‘, ‘A sine wave with JavaFX and Scala‘, ‘2D Water Effects with JavaFX and Scala‘, ‘Lets go green and plant some trees‘ and ‘JavaFX Tree Visualization Part 2‘.

JavaFX and Raspberry Pi

• José Pereda has posted about NXTBeeFX: “A JavaFX based app for Raspberry Pi to control a Lego NXT robot wirelessly”.

Catch you all next week!

JavaFX links of the week, January 7

by Jonathan Giles | Jan 6, 2013 | Links

Hi all. Welcome to the first post of the new year! I hope you all had a chance to wind down for a few days over the holidays. I did, but it’s great to be back at work now as I have a lot to get done this year! Today is my sixth wedding anniversary, so please excuse the brevity! Anywho, let’s get into the links 🙂

JavaFX

• Angela Caicedo will be presenting ‘some cool JavaFX stuff‘ this week at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group. If you’re in the area you should definitely consider attending. If you are not, they do a live stream that you can join in on (and chat with others who are also on the stream). I’ll try to be on there…
• Tom Schindl has announced the release of e(fx)clipse 0.8.0.
• Johan Vos has announced the open source availability of the RedFX library, which is a JavaFX remote asynchronous communication, messaging and synchronization project.
• Hendrik Ebbers has blogged about his BindableTransition class and invokeAndWait method that he has made available to developers.
• Gerrit Grunwald has blogged about his work in creating a JavaFX-based heatmap visualisation.
• Ed Thompson has another ‘JavaFX from the trenches’ post, this week about singleton controllers.
• The Panemu blog (the developers of TiwulFX, which just had a beta 2 release announced), have posted about creating a custom menu separator in JavaFX.
• Steven Schwenke has blogged about separation and lifecycles in JavaFX.
• Pedro Duque Vieira continues to improve JMetro by adding support for ScrollBars and ScrollPanes this week.
• Alistair Rutherford has compared JavaFX and Pivot, and then posted about building a JavaFX application for a command-line tool he has written in the past.
• Leon Atherton has announced that IDR Solutions have included support for PDF to FXML conversion.
• Robert Ladstätter has written about how to compile OpenJFX on Mac OS X.
• Jan Köhnlein has written how JavaFX loves Xtend.

JavaFX and Raspberry Pi

• Mark Heckler has blogged about creating a portable Java/JavaFX rig using Raspberry Pi.
• Erkki Nokso-Koivisto has a post about a game he has written to run on a Raspberry Pi.
• Tim Yates has a post about getting GroovyFX to work on his Raspberry Pi.

That’s all for this week. Catch you all in a weeks time 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, December 31

by Jonathan Giles | Dec 30, 2012 | Links

Welcome to the last JavaFX links of the week for this year! Obviously with the festive season in full swing this week is a relatively quiet week, but nonetheless I have some interesting links for you to read. Enjoy, and have a good new years and start to 2013! Catch you in a weeks time! 🙂

• Stephen Chin has announced his plans to go on another night hacking tour, this time taking in the Nordic countries between January 25 and February 7.
• I was given a (virtual) clip around the head by Ed Thompson for his issues when dealing with the JavaFX ComboBox control. Fortunately most issues are on their way towards being resolved, and as always I’d love to work with people feeling pain in any UI control to develop improvements and / or review patches based on the OpenJFX source code.
• Hendrik Ebbers has started playing with JavaFX on Raspberry Pi. He has been investigating using DataFX and GridFX on it, and has posted some videos to show progress.
• Andy Till has open sourced a JavaFX application that he has been developing called EstiMate.
• Narayan Maharjan has posted part two of his 3D Object (cube) ‘concept to code’ series of posts.
• Thierry Wasyl continues to develop his DrawFX application, and has posted an update with his latest progress.

That’s all for this year – catch you all again next year when we do it all over again! 🙂

JavaFX link of the week, December 24

by Jonathan Giles | Dec 23, 2012 | Links

It’s Christmas eve here and there is a huge number of links, so please excuse the brevity – I want to get back to family and food! 🙂

JavaFX

• Pavel Safrata announced that a bunch more JavaFX code was open sourced this week, including animations, timelines, the scenegraph interface and prism implementation, etc.
• The developer preview of Scene Builder 1.1 b15 is now out, with support for Linux. You can read the release notes to learn what is new in the 1.1 release cycle.
• Dolphin 0.4 has been released. Check out the changes.
• The December issue of JAX Magazine has an article written by Johan Vos on DataFX.
• Danno Ferrin has updated his approach to mirroring the OpenJFX project on bitbucket.
• Jim Weaver has posted a video showcasing a number of features contained within the JFXtras project.
• Bruno Borges has posted a video of his WebFX project, which is essentially a JavaFX-based web browser that can browse both HTML and FXML ‘websites’.
• Marco Jakob has posted part six in his series of tutorial blogs for JavaFX, this time focusing on JavaFX deployment with e(fx)clipse.
• Additionally, Marco has three further posts this week, with the following titles: “JavaFX Event Handlers and Change Listeners“, “JavaFX TableView Cell Renderer” and “JavaFX TableView Filter“.
• Patrick Moule has posted about “Building and packaging of JavaFX applications with Gradle“.
• Ed has posted “JavaFX from the Trenches – Part 1 – Native Packaging“. Note that the article is split over five pages.
• Canoo have announced that they are offering JavaFX consulting and training.
• TiwulFX has put up a website and video of their improvements to the JavaFX TableView control.
• Leon Atherton has posted about “Integrating JavaFX with Swing: The JFXPanel“.
• Toru Takahashi has a page detailing building a standalone JavaFX JAR consisting of multiple jar files.
• Thierry Wasyl has posted two videos of his DrawFX prototype.
• There are a few posts this week related to JavaFX being used in alternative languages. Sanshiro Yoshida has a post about tic-tac-toe written in Clojure, cocoatomo has a post about using JavaFX from Jython, and Asko K has posted about “adding ‘condapply’ to Scala, for natural JavaFX bindings“.
• Terada Yoshio has posted about building a Java EE 7 WebSocket client sample application with JavaFX.

JavaFX and Raspberry Pi

• JavaFX on ARM CPUs (like the Raspberry Pi) got a big boost this week, with the release of a hard float JDK 8 (with JavaFX) for ARM early access build. You can read the release notes for more information.
• Richard Bair posted some performance numbers for Java on the Raspberry Pi, showing that it is possible to get really good performance out of such a cheap and low-powered device. He also has a few useful tips for how to get JavaFX applications working on it.
• Stephen Chin has posted a useful guide to getting started with Java 8 (including JavaFX 8.0) on a Raspberry Pi. I followed them and everything went smoothly.
• Robert Savage has posted another tutorial on setting up the Raspberry Pi to use JDK 8, with greater detail on how to SSH into it (which is useful for those of you not wanting to hook up another keyboard, mouse and screen).
• Jim Connors has put up an interesting YouTube video where he hooks a Raspberry Pi up to a tv and communicates with it wirelessly as it displays a scoreboard application. I’d love to see the code for that :-).
• José Pereda has put up part two of his series of posts on “ArduinoFX: A JavaFX GUI for Home Automation with Raspberry Pi and Arduino“.
• René Jahn continues to explore embedded technologies, this week posting “Welcome Raspbery Pi” where he talks through his initial issues setting the device up.

Wow, that took a long time to write! Catch you all again next week – and I wish you all a great festive season.