JavaFX News, Demos and Insight // FX Experience

Interview with Daniel Zwolenski

by Jonathan Giles | Aug 12, 2012 | Interviews

Today I have an interview with Daniel Zwolenski, a developer who has been involved with JavaFX, both from a commercial point of view, and as part of the open source community. He is active in openjfx-dev mailing list discussions, as well as running a very popular blog on using JavaFX in enterprise environments. I first had the privilege to meet up with Daniel when I was living in Brisbane, Australia last year, and he continues to be a contributor to the future of OpenJFX discussions today. Without further ado, lets get go with the interview – please enjoy! 🙂

Hi Daniel – could you please introduce yourself to everyone?
For the last 14 years I have been working in the Java application space, designing and building Java applications of all shapes and sizes for many different clients and industries. I’m based in Australia, currently in Melbourne, but I have worked in the UK, Ireland and very briefly in France.

Among many other projects, I was the architect and led the development of Coinland (an online virtual world for kids sponsored by one of the major Australian banks), I’ve driven the re-development of SMART (the key reporting tool for the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy in the state of NSW), and I’ve been a core part of the team that developed the management system for Tourism Australia’s ATE (the largest tourism expo in the southern hemisphere).

I’ve deliberately stayed as an independent contractor, changing fields and companies in search of the most interesting and challenging work. I love the variety, and opportunity this provides to grow my skills and expand my experiences. I have managed teams of all shapes and sizes, worked in with large corporate teams, and at times, acted as a one-man development team.

I get a buzz from interacting with my users and user interface development has always been my preferred space. I cut my teeth on Microsoft’s Visual C++ and MFC platform, and then happily made the move to Java when Swing was released. I’ve worked in the web space, but always felt limited by what I could provide for my users, even when using technologies like GWT. I’ve also developed Android applications and been involved with some iPhone development.

JavaFX is a very natural fit for me, and a platform that I really want to see dominate mainstream application development. I want to be at the point where 9 out of 10 contracts on seek.com are looking for JavaFX developers, and when I walk in and pick up some legacy system, it’s a JavaFX application, not a webapp. In a perfect world I would never have to debug another cross-browser JavaScript problem, or worry about what will happen to my session scope if the user hits the back-button.

Although I love to code, I don’t use computers much outside of development. I spend a lot of my time working with non-profit organisations, especially environmental ones. Recently I have taken on a contract with Our Community, a group providing software and services to the non-profit sector. It’s an awesome place that is the perfect balance of commercial systems development, community awareness and social conscious. Unfortunately they are not yet using JavaFX, but I hope to have them converted before too long!

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JavaFX links of the week, August 6

by Jonathan Giles | Aug 5, 2012 | Links

Welcome to another weeks worth of JavaFX links! There are a heap of links this week, so I hope you all find something you enjoy and learn from! 🙂

JavaFX 2.2 developer preview build 19 was released this week.
Igor Nekrestyanov has posted about drop-in resources when using the native packaging feature in JavaFX 2.2.
Tom Schindl has announced e(fx)clipse 0.1.0 has been released, which includes a huge number of new features for things like native packaging, splash screens, Scene Builder integration, and a lot more.
For those of you who want a logarithmic scale in the JavaFX charts API, it’s your lucky day: Kevin Senechal has posted an implementation you can drop into your own apps!
Roger Brinkley interviewed me for the Java Spotlight Podcast whilst he was on vacation in New Zealand. Of course the topics covered are all to do with my area of focus: JavaFX UI controls.
Ander Ruiz and I released Scenic View 1.1 beta build 7, and based on the feedback we think this may be the last beta release before a final release of 1.1 this week.
The UGate blog has posted part three of the JavaFX programmatic POJO expression bindings posts. You can find part one and two at their respective links.
Chika Okereke has blogged about PDF to JavaFX conversions, this time covering fade-in transitions in JavaFX.
Andreas Billmann has two blog posts this week. Firstly, he shares some code on how to create a glowing icon button to catch users attention, and building on top of this he then shares code which shows small (and possibly animated) icons on top of a button, again to catch the users attention. This kind of code should be polished and added to the JFXtras project!
Sanjay Dasgupta has blogged about his FX.js project, which, according to the language guide, is an attempt to allow developers to develop JavaFX applications using the JavaScript language.
José Pereda continues to blog on his work around his MatrixPanel control, this week showing animated traffic signs.
WichitSombat has posted a YouTube video on how to set up a development environment for JavaFX using IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 11.0.2.
Thierry Wasyl has posted two posts this week. Firstly he talks about keyboard shortcuts and mnemonics in JavaFX 2, and secondly he has posted another video of his TweetWallFX application.

That’s all folks! Catch you all in a weeks time… 🙂

Announcing Scenic View 1.1 beta build 7

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 30, 2012 | Scenic View

Another quick post to announce that Scenic View 1.1 beta build 7 is now available for download. This release attempts to resolve some of the issues found on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. We are once again keen to hear your feedback – please leave it in the comments section below!

JavaFX links of the week, July 30

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 29, 2012 | Links

Hello world! 🙂 Here are the links for this week – enjoy 🙂

Carl Dea presented at the Montgomery County Java User Group, but unfortunately I can’t open the Google Docs link here – maybe you’ll have better luck.
Mark Heckler has posted about how to get started (fast) with NetBeans 7.2, Scene Builder and JavaFX 2.
José Pereda has posted part two of his series on the new MatrixPanel control that he has now c0ntributed to the JFXtras project.
Peter Pilgrim has blogged about ScalaFX and some workarounds for SBT issues.
Narayan Maharjan has blogged about how to write pre-loaders for JavaFX applications.
Thierry Wasyl has a blog post detailing the properties and binding APIs in JavaFX 2.
Steve Hannah has a blog post titled “JavaFX has finally arrived“, where he explains his first impressions with JavaFX 2. I should note there is one mistake in this post: there is no need for Swing if you want your menubars to appear in the Mac global menubar area – simply call menuBar.setUseSystemMenuBar(true) in JavaFX 2.1 and later releases.

Catch you next week!

JavaFX links of the week, July 23

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 22, 2012 | Links

Hey all – welcome to another weeks worth of links! Enjoy 🙂

Gerrit Grunwald has another post exploring the new PixelWriter and WritableImage APIs in JavaFX 2.2.
José Pereda has followed Gerrit’s lead and created a dot-matrix visualisation called the MatrixPanel.
Java evangelist Angela Caicedo has blogged about the improved deployment support in JavaFX 2.2.
In the same vein, Neil Ghosh has blogged about how easy it is to create native bundles with JavaFX 2.2.
Angela has also put up a video of using Scene Builder 1.0 with NetBeans 7.2.
Sai Dandem has posted about his Gradient Builder application, which is designed to make designing JavaFX gradients easier.
Tom Schindl has a tutorial on how to create an e4 application that uses JavaFX as its rendering technology, rather than SWT.
Narayan Maharjan has blogged about how to create a draggable ListCell, allowing for reordering rows inside a ListView.
Jeff Martin posted to the openjfx-dev mailing list about Java Inventor Gallery. As he puts it, “Javi (for short) is an app builder and framework that lets anyone build and deploy rich internet database apps in minutes without having to spend years learning dozens of software, server and internet technologies.”
Ander Ruiz and I put up a beta version of Scenic View 1.1 to get feedback on how it was working on users machines.

Catch you again in a weeks time 🙂

Announcing Scenic View 1.1 beta build 6

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 19, 2012 | News, Scenic View

Hi all! Just a quick post to say that Ander and I have been really, really, really busy working on Scenic View 1.1, and whilst it isn’t finished yet (we’re still working out the last bugs), we wanted to get a build out to you folks to test with (and provide us with valid feedback). So, right now we’re making available Scenic View 1.1 beta 6. This release is an almost total rewrite of Scenic View, and I will dive more into exactly what has changed in a future blog post. For now, we are really wanting to hear how it works for you. Leave comments on this post to let us know what OS you’re using.

So, go here, download the 1.1 b6 file, and run it. To run Scenic View 1.1 b6 you have a few options, as opposed to 1.0.1 and earlier releases where we only supported the ScenicView.show(scene) method. The one I really want you to test now is the new standalone application feature. Simply double-click on the ScenicView.jar file, and it should start up. Depending on your system, it may ask you to provide paths to two jar files on your system.

Some important points to remember:

The standalone Scenic View will auto-discover running JavaFX applications on your machine, so simply start Scenic View and your preferred JavaFX application, and it’ll automatically appear in Scenic View.
We are aware of issues on Mac OS – we do some quite complex VM stuff, and it seems it is a little different on each OS.
To find the tools.jar file on your system (we try to auto-find it but we can’t always), browse inside the lib folder within your JDK installation (not your JRE installation).

We really look forward to your feedback!

JavaFX links of the week, July 16

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 15, 2012 | Links

Hi all – welcome to another weeks worth of links. I really hope you find something new and enjoyable that you can learn from! 🙂

I can’t direct link to it, but the latest Java Magazine issue has a number of interesting articles related to JavaFX. You really should consider subscribing (it’s free!).
Gerrit Grunwald has posted a good post about pushing pixels with the new (in JavaFX 2.2) PixelWriter class. With JavaFX 2.2 there is a lot more support in the API for working at a lower-level than what was previously available with the retained-mode scenegraph. This has been something people have been asking for for a very long time, and personally I’m very excited to see what people can do with it! 🙂
Stephen Chin has written a DZone Ref Card for JavaFX 2. If you’re new to JavaFX, this will be very useful for you, I would imagine.
The Canoo blog has posted about styling your JavaFX user interface using CSS vs Java code.
I interviewed Tom Schindl (the developer behind e(fx)clipse – the JavaFX tooling for Eclipse project). Obviously the main purpose of the discussion was to get a good understanding of the e(fx)clipse project, and I imagine it might be useful for many readers who like to use the Eclipse IDE for their development.
IDR solutions have created a JavaFX-specific page for their JavaFX PDF viewer library. Note that this is a commercial library, but I think it is cool enough to mention in these link roundups.
Narayan Maharjan has created a blog post detailing how to customise the JavaFX ScrollBar control using CSS.
Geertjan Wielenga has blogged about integrating JavaFX Charts into the NetBeans RCP.
kamiltoszek has blogged about controlling when the FXML controller class is instantiated.

Now, it’s back to work for me! Catch you all in a weeks time 🙂

Interview with Tom Schindl

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 13, 2012 | Interviews

This time around I have an interview with Tom Schindl, a developer who has been active on the openjfx-dev mailing list teaching the Oracle engineers a thing or two about OSGi, and how to play nice with it. We really value his feedback, and all other feedback we receive from members of the JavaFX community. Enjoy the interview, and if you have any feedback about what Tom is discussing, please feel free to leave comments on this post. I’ll make sure he keeps an eye out and answers any questions you may have :-).

Hi Tom – could you please introduce yourself to everyone?
In my daytime job I’m cofounder and CTO of a small software company named BestSolution.at located in western Austria where we develop solutions for and provide consulting to customers around the world.

We have put our focus in the last years on OSGi and Eclipse technologies and because of this engagement I’ve become a committer on various Eclipse projects including the next generation of the Eclipse Platform named e4 (the foundation of the Eclipse 4.2 SDK) for which I wrote the initial prototype together with an employee from IBM.

You’re a relative newcomer to the JavaFX world, joining around the release of JavaFX 2.0. What drew you into JavaFX?
At the time JavaFX 2.0 got released I was searching since some time already for an alternate UI technology. Because of Eclipse RCP we historically worked and still work in many project with SWT. Like any technology SWT has its advantages and disadvantages. One of major problems is and was that you can’t really style all properties of a control because the widget is not drawn by SWT but the native widgettoolkit and so I was searching for another UI technology which doesn’t have such a limitation.

So JavaFX 2.0 came just at the right time for me and I liked the design of the toolkit including its property and observables API (at Eclipse I’ve been involved in the eclipse databinding library so I know this problem domain a bit) and most importantly the useage of CSS to declaratively styling the UI, interesting enough is that once more at Eclipse we decided to use CSS as well to style the e4 platform.

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JavaFX links of the week, July 9

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 8, 2012 | Links

Hi all – here is another weeks worth of links. I’m run off my feet working on the latest JavaFX release, so please pardon the brevity! 🙂

Igor Nekrestyanov has published an article on packaging Swing apps with integrated JavaFX content.
Adam Bien has published part two of his series on the enterprise side of JavaFX.
Geertjan Wielenga continues to explore the intersection of JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JavaFX and Java.
Gunnar Morling has blogged about using JavaFX 2 with Maven.
The first chapter of Carl Dea’s book “JavaFX 2.0: Introduction by Example” has been made available online for free.
Gerrit Grunwald has done yet another of his ‘Friday Fun Component’ posts, this time recreating a ‘domino-piece clock‘.
In another post (and on another blog), Gerrit has also posted about JavaFX dynamic shadows, to create more life-like effects.
If you want to run the developer preview versions of JavaFX 2.2 on Ubuntu Linux, you can now follow these online instructions.
Andres Almiray has written about using Groovy and Griffon to build JavaFX applications without all the Java boilerplate.
Patrick Martin has started a blog at javafx2.org. It covers topics such as reflective event handling, JavaFX and Scala, and JavaFX and Groovy.
John Yeary has blogged about how he created a JavaFX 2.2 pie chart using JPA.
Stephen Chin and Jim Weaver were interviewed (note: direct MP3 file link) by Donald Smith recently.

JavaFX links of the week, July 2

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 1, 2012 | Links

Hi all! Welcome to another weeks worth of links – I hope you find something useful 🙂

Daniel Fuchs has blogged about connecting SceneBuilder edited FXML to Java code. This is a really good overview for those of you new to FXML and JavaFX.
Jim Clarke and Gerrit Grunwald have improved the SteelSeries gauges in JFXtras Labs to better support FXML. This is a very cool improvement – whenever custom controls are developed, supporting FXML is critical, so it is nice to see 3rd parties doing that now too.
Speaking of Gerrit, he was recently interviewed by the Java Spotlight Podcast, where he talks about HTML 5 and JavaFX 2.
Sebastian Damm has blogged about the JavaFX 2 GridLayout layout container.
Geertjan Wielenga has written an HTML application that he embeds inside a JavaFX WebView, which itself it embedded with NetBeans. Despite this, he discusses how easy it is for these different technologies to communicate.
Java2S now has a catalogue of JavaFX hints and tips. Well worth checking out if you’re stuck! 🙂

That’s that for another week! Catch you in a weeks time 🙂

FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

Interview with Daniel Zwolenski

Announcing Scenic View 1.1 beta build 7

Announcing Scenic View 1.1 beta build 6

Interview with Tom Schindl

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