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 | Sep 16, 2012 | Links
Hi all and welcome to another weeks worth of JavaFX links! 🙂 It isn’t long until JavaOne comes around again, so everyone is in the traditional quiet phase whilst they work on their JavaOne talks. I’m sure it’ll be another great conference this year (and I can’t wait to see a bunch of you there!). Anyway, on with the news!
- The Java Spotlight Podcast interviewed a fellow member of the JavaFX team, Daniel Blaukopf. He is the Embedded Java Client Architect at Oracle, working on JavaFX embedded functionality.
- Speaking of JavaOne, there is a NetBeans community day happening on the Sunday. There will be plenty of talk about JavaFX, so I’ll be there. Geertjan Wielenga has written more about it at DZone.
- Also related to JavaOne, if you’re going and you’re a fan of Java desktop related topics, you might want to join Stephen Chin and I, along with a number of people from Oracle and the community, as well as one very special guest, at the fourth annual Java desktop lunch. If you’re interested, please register and we’ll be in touch.
- Gerrit Grunwald continues to develop his Steel Series gauges as part of the JFXtras project. This week he has blogged about a new simple gauge he has written, how easy it is to add touch support to his gauges, and finally a D/A clock based on a real-world clock.
- Danno Ferrin has blogged about how to style your custom UI controls.
- Part two of Jim Weaver’s ‘Expressing the UI for Enterprise Applications with JavaFX 2.0 FXML‘ series is now available on OTN.
- Jim Gough also has three posts this week, firstly he blogs about improving animation performance if there are a number of nodes animating independently, secondly he has a review of the Pro JavaFX 2 book, and thirdly about cleanly closing FXML-based applications.
- José Pereda has blogged about developing a JavaFX-based weekly scheduler. This is actually a control I’d like to see developed – a proper calendar control with support for filling in your appointments, etc (so like what you have in Google Calendar or MigCalendar basically).
- A new blog I discovered recently has a bunch of posts on JavaFX, all written by someone going by the name NotZed. Posts include topics on writing a JavaFX slideshow app, creating a video cube, creating an ‘infinite drawing canvas‘, and finally he creates a smooth video list.
That’s all for this week – catch you all next week! 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Sep 9, 2012 | Links
Hi all! Sorry for the delay in this weeks post – I’ve been snowed under with work (as per usual it seems!). Please pardon the brevity this week 🙂
Catch you all next week!
by Richard Bair | Sep 4, 2012 | News
We’ve been working hard on performance lately for FX 8. Following is a performance report from Katya Pavlova, one of the members of our performance team who gives us regular (at least weekly) updates on the performance of the platform.
Notable Improvements (comparing to fx2.2-b21-ga)
There are a lot of improvements integrated into fx8.0. Most significant are:
- Multithreading has been implemented and turned on
- RT-15195 “Allow QuantumRenderer thread and FX Application thread to run in parallel”
- A lot of Controls improvements including:
- RT-23873 “Investigate (and improve) ListView / TreeView / TableView performance”
- RT-20840 “fx2.2-h17-b01: Adding new column to TableView results in creating new N columns instead of 1”
- RT-22244 “Pisces Renderer shows huge performance win when coded in C”
- Web node improvements
JavaFX 8.0 performance was improved for almost all benchmarks. In particular performance was improved for:
- more than 50% in Charts
- more than 100% in some Controls
- up to 30% in DirtyArea
- more than 20% in FXFire
- up to 30% in Guimark2.Bitmap and Guimark2.Vector
- up to 30% in JFXPanel-GUIMark2.Bitmap and more than 100% in JFXPanel-GUIMark2.Vector
- more than 30% in Layout
- up to 20% in WebNode.Guimark2-Text
by Jonathan Giles | Sep 2, 2012 | Links
Hi everyone! Welcome to another JavaFX links roundup. I really hope you find a few links that teach you something new! 🙂
- Danno Ferrin has blogged about ‘the life and times of a JavaFX Skin‘, which is well-worth reading if you are interested in creating custom controls.
- Stephen Chin has posted part three of his JavaFX and Spring talk, this time focusing on authentication and authorisation.
- Speaking of Stephen, he also recently presented at the Portland JUG – and now you can watch the video of that talk.
- And finally, Stephen will be speaking at the SFBay ACM on “JavaFX 2 – A Java Developer’s Guide” on September 19th. If you’re in the area you might want to check it out.
- Tom Schindl has blogged about CSS attribute description and validation, and what he has done to improve CSS assistance in his e(fx)clipse tooling for JavaFX in Eclipse.
- Mark Heckler has blogged about creating dialogs in JavaFX, which is something JavaFX doesn’t yet ship included in the runtime (although I’ve had a bunch of them built in my local repo for a year or so now – I’m trying to get them into a release as soon as possible!).
- Gerrit Grunwald continues to make great looking gauges, this week mimicking the look of an Oracle ADF gauge. You can also watch a video of it in action.
- Patrick Martin has updated the website for his Dex project (which is a visualisation application). He has also blogged that Dex 0.5 is coming out soon.
- Peter Moskovits has blogged about the ‘three steps to build a killer WebSocket app with JavaFX‘.
- Per Lundholm has blogged about Window, Scene and Node coordinates in JavaFX.
- Pedro Duque Vieira has two shorts posts this week. Firstly, he has posted about creating circular buttons in JavaFX using CSS, and modifying the styling of text within UI controls (once again simply by using CSS).
- Sanjay Dasgupta continues to blog about his FX.js project, announcing that the FX.js application architecture documentation is now available (which you can see here).
- Most importantly of all, Nagai Masato has created SmileyFX, which allows for you to easily insert smiley’s into your user interface.
- Marco Dinacci has blogged about taking your Java desktop application to the Mac App Store.
That’s all for us this week – hopefully you found a few of the links above useful! 🙂 Catch you all in a weeks time!
by Jonathan Giles | Aug 26, 2012 | Links
Hi all, welcome to another weeks worth of links! This week there are plenty of them, so please enjoy 🙂
- The Java Tutorials blog has a short post up about a new feature in JavaFX 2.2: the ability to take a snapshot of a scene and turn it into an image.
- Stephen Chin has posted two posts about JavaFX in Spring. Firstly, he posts about application initialisation, and secondly about configuration and FXML.
- Separately, Stephen has put up the slides from another of his talks, this time titled ‘Hacking JavaFX with Groovy, Clojure, Scala, and Visage‘.
- Johan Vos was interviewed on the Java Spotlight Podcast about Glassfish and JavaFX.
- Carl Dea has published part five of his JavaFX game dev tutorial. This time he focuses on sound.
- Andy Till has started investigating writing a new CSS style for JavaFX. To support this, the JFXtras team has set up a new sub-project called jfxtras-styles, which will be a home for custom JavaFX CSS style files. This is already the home of Andy’s work.
- Thomas Bolz has written about obfuscating your JavaFX code at compile time to ensure it is harder to decompile. This is well worth reading for anyone putting out commercial products using JavaFX.
- Pedro Duque Vieira has written about integrating JavaFX and Swing inside a single application.
- In a similar post, Eric Bruno has a post over at Dr Dobbs about integrating JavaFX and Swing.
- Andreas Billmann has made further progress on his JavaFX ‘MiniIcon’ animated button, and he has a blog talking about how he turned it into a ‘proper’ JavaFX UI control.
- Tom Schindl has made available a SVG to FXML command-line converter tool.
- William Markito Oliveira has an article up on OTN about ‘Oracle WebLogic RESTful Management Services: From Command Line to JavaFX‘.
- Gerrit Grunwald has returned from vacation and has created an elliptical gradient API that is now available in JFXtras.
- Christian Schudt has blogged about using Maven to build, sign and deploy JavaFX applications.
- Jeff Smith has blogged about his early work in developing a JavaFX map viewer, which he calls JFXMapPane. With a bit more work, this will likely be integrated into JFXtras.
- UGate have announced their open source ‘Arduino-Java-XBee security system‘.
- For those interested in NetBeans, there is a NetBeans Community Day on the Sunday before JavaOne (actually, the JavaOne keynotes are also on Sunday). There are talks here on JavaFX also.
I warned you about the number of links! Keep up the great work everyone, and I’ll catch you again next week 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Aug 19, 2012 | Links
Welcome to another week of JavaFX links! Enjoy! 🙂
Catch you all next week.
by Jonathan Giles | Aug 16, 2012 | Scenic View
Scenic View 1.1.1 is a quick bug fix release following hot on the heels of Scenic View 1.1.0. This release improves the internal debugging ability of Scenic View so that we’re better able to help you when you can’t run Scenic View! Hopefully you’ll do us the courtesy of downloading this version before you file any bug reports with us (via FX Experience comments).
As always, the download is available from the Scenic View page.
This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by the letters S and V, with a big dollop of F and X.
by Richard Bair | Aug 15, 2012 | General
Say what!? JavaFX 8.0 is on its way? Sure enough! But first, by now you’ve probably seen the announcement that JavaFX 2.2 has been released (GA downloads here). A lot of highly anticipated features have made their way into this release, including a Canvas node similar to the HTML Canvas in that it lets you draw in an immediate mode fashion. We also added the ability to take a “snapshot” of some portion of the scene graph into an image. And we’ve added writable images, such that you can either modify the pixels directly or use AWT BufferedImages via the swing.ext package and convert them to JavaFX images. There have been tons of other additions and enhancements which we’ll be covering in the coming months.
Another major announcement as part of Java SE 7u6 (which was co-released with JavaFX) is that you can run JavaSE Embedded for free on devices such as the Raspberry PI. Up until this point you always needed a license to run on ARM, whereas starting with 7u6 the license allows for individual use on Raspberry PI etc. I’ve got my PI handy and am busy hacking away on it, along with the BeagleBoards and PandaBoards we’ve got en masse.
We’ve been doing tons of performance work recently, with all that work going into the 8.0 repository. Speaking of which, because JavaFX is being co-bundled with Java 8, we’ve decided to skip a few numbers in our version scheme to catch up. So the next major release (formerly 3.0) will actually just be called JavaFX and share the version number of the JRE that it ships with. If JavaFX becomes part of JavaSE in JavaSE 9 timeframe as we hope, then it would clearly no longer have its own version number, so it made sense to us to get in line now.
With that, I’m going to have to sign off and get back to performance hacking!
by Jonathan Giles | Aug 14, 2012 | Scenic View
Ander Ruiz and I have been working frantically on Scenic View since we first released it a while back, and we are really, really, really pleased to finally announce the release of verion 1.1.0. Scenic View 1.1.0 took a while to get out as it is a huge update to Scenic View. The features are all detailed on the Scenic View help page, but briefly the most important feature of this release is that whilst Scenic View still supports the old ScenicView.show(scene) method, it now also is a standalone application that can discover running JavaFX applications at runtime. This was by far the biggest feature request we received, and we heard you and spent untold hours hacking it out (and pulling our hair out!). The amount of hacking required to find and communicate with JavaFX applications at runtime is immense, and I am so pleased that we were able to crack this!
Other new features include support for java instrumentation, multistage, a heap of improvements based on user feedback, improvements in the component highlight feature, etc, etc, etc.
The other big thing for this release is that we have a really good foundation to start adding new functionality, and we already have 1.2.0 in the works with a bunch of new features in it, including event tracing, animation tracing, and javadoc browsing. We’ll be getting 1.2.0 out as soon as possible. Hold on – we’ve got a lot in store!
I’m not one for big press release announcements. For those of you who use Scenic View (and based on the download stats there are a lot of you!), get downloading! For those of you new to Scenic View, read the help page to understand what Scenic View is.
by Jonathan Giles | Aug 12, 2012 | Links
Hi all, here’s another weeks worth of links. Enjoy and keep up the hard work!
Catch you all next week 🙂
