JavaFX News, Demos and Insight // FX Experience

JavaFX links of the week, May 29

by Jonathan Giles | May 28, 2012 | Links

Hi all! Sorry for the delayed post this week – I have just moved to a new house (just outside of Palmerston North, New Zealand), and didn’t have internet access. Now that things are starting to get back to normal (and my internet is thankfully restored), I’ve got a bunch of links for your reading pleasure. Enjoy! 🙂

As per usual, new developer preview builds of JavaFX 2.2 and Scene Builder 1.0 have been released.
Along with the updated developer preview builds, the documentation team has also released updated Scene Builder documentation.
I wrote a post here at FX Experience regarding how to show context menus when using a custom cell factory in ListView/TreeView/TableView controls.
Gregg Setzer has started an open source project to create native looks for JavaFX applications. He has started off by developing a Windows 8 CSS file. I would love to see more people join this project and develop a number of CSS files for various operating system releases. If you’re interested, Greg is watching the thread of this post for any comments.
Anton Epple has posted a comparison between the Scenic View application released a few weeks ago and the NetBeans Graphical UI Debugger. I will note that Scenic View is about to see another release, with a huge number of features added including live editing, searching (class name, node id and property name), and much, much more. However, there are of course things that Scenic View will likely never do, including integrating with the source code, so there is certainly value in getting to know both tools.
Gerrit Grunwald has blogged about using the new Canvas API in the JavaFX 2.2 developer preview builds.
Jim Weaver has posted part two of his ‘Best Practices for JavaFX 2 Enterprise Applications‘ series.
Carl Dea wrote part three of his JavaFX 2 game tutorial.
Thierry Wasyl has put up part four and part five of his TweetWallFX blog series. These posts cover using the JavaFX charting API, and pulling the whole project together. He has also put up a screencast demonstrating some of the more recent features.
Amol Hingmire has posted about JavaFX 2.x development using FXML.
Zoran Pavlovic has two posts this week. Firstly, he introduces how to style JavaFX buttons using CSS, and secondly he introduces the JavaFX ListView control.

That’s all for another week. Again, sorry for the delay. See you all again next week! 🙂

ListView, custom cell factories, and context menus

by Jonathan Giles | May 20, 2012 | Controls, Tips n' Tricks

One question I see occasionally is people asking how to go about using prebuilt cell factories (such as those provided in the DataFX project run by Johan Vos and I, those sitting in the OpenJFX 2.2 repo in the javafx.scene.control.cell package, or just those that they have created internally), and also show a context menu when the user right clicks. More generally, the problem is that cell factories are blackboxes, and there is no support for chaining cell factories together (or even getting hold of the cells as they are being used).

The answer is quite simple: wrap the cell factory inside another cell factory, and set the ContextMenu on the wrapping cell. In other words, you would write code such as this (for ListView):

// The cell factory you actually want to use to render the cell
Callback<ListView<T>, ListCell<T> wrappedCellFactory = ...; 

// The wrapping cell factory that will set the context menu onto the wrapped cell
Callback<ListView<T>, ListCell<T> cellFactory = new Callback<ListView<T>, ListCell<T>>() {
    @Override public ListCell<T> call(ListView<T> listView) {
        ListCell<T> cell = wrappedCellFactory  == null ? new DefaultListCell<T>() : wrappedCellFactory.call(listView);
        cell.setContextMenu(contextMenu);
        return cell;
    }
};

// Creating a ListView and setting the cell factory on it
ListView<T> listView = new ListView<T>();
listView.setCellFactory(cellFactory);

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JavaFX links of the week, May 21

by Jonathan Giles | May 20, 2012 | Links

Welcome to this weeks links roundup. I’ve got plenty of good JavaFX links this week, so enjoy! 🙂

JavaFX 2.2 build 8, and Scene Builder 1.0 build 38 are now available for download for testing.
If you’re new to Scene Builder, check out the developer preview of the ‘getting started with JavaFX Scene Builder‘.
Eric Bruno has an article up on Dr. Dobbs about the Scene Builder application that was recently made available as a developer preview.
Patrick Martin has been very busy working on a new tool called Data Explorer, or Dex for short. This tool allows for data import and visualisation, and looks like it has huge potential. Check out the link, if even just for the screenshots (many of which use external non-JavaFX libraries).
Gerrit Grunwald has blogged about exporting content from Adobe Fireworks CS6, and using the content in JavaFX (by copying the provided SVG, and slightly modifying the provided CSS).
For those that couldn’t attend Stephen Chin’s talks at JustJava Brazil, he has now posted the translated slide decks online for you to check out.
Thierry Wasyl has put up part two and three of his posts on his TweetWallFX application. Part two covers the creation of the business objects and use of FXML and controller classes, whilst part three covers transitions and animations, as well as tips on using the FXMLLoader class.
Anton Epple continues to refine his JavaFX pinball game, adding features such as ball tracking (that is, zooming in and translating the view to follow the ball around the screen) and custom pinball node renderers. He also demonstrates the improved NetBeans support for Scene Builder that is coming in NetBeans 7.2.
Will Hoover has posted sample code to create dialogs in JavaFX.
Thomas Bolz has posted an applet version of his SudokuFX application which you can play online.
Mark Anro Silva has posted code online to show how easy it is to create a loading indicator in JavaFX.

Catch you again next week 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 14

by Jonathan Giles | May 13, 2012 | Links, Scenic View

Hi all. Sorry about the lack of a post last week – I just got back from JavaOne India and was overloaded with work which I had to catch up on. However, I was collecting links all last week as well, and there are now a heap of good links to read through this week! 🙂 Enjoy!

JavaFX 2.1 has barely been released and already we’ve got builds of JavaFX 2.2 available. In fact, we’re already up to build 08 of JavaFX 2.2, and build 37 of Scene Builder 1.0.
I released a tool (built initially by Amy Fowler) that we use inside Oracle called Scenic View. I am now working with Ander Ruiz on an updated release which includes a number of new features. You can see a screenshot at the end of this post of the new version (which is still in active development (both the UI and the functionality)).
Michael Heinrichs, a fellow team members in the JavaFX team at Oracle, was interviewed at JFokus, and the video is now online.
There was quite a bit of noise regarding people getting JavaFX up and running on the Raspberry Pi device.
Weiqi Gao has got a very in-depth article up online about his experiments with JavaFX 3D scenes.
Tom Schindl has noted that he is seeing improvements in Netbeans JavaFX support that already exist in his e(fx)clipse project (but that it is great that his ‘competition’ is improving functionality).
Java_Buddy has blogged about how to get javadoc documentation to appear in NetBeans when working with JavaFX API.
Thierry Wasyl has started work on building an application called TweetWallFX. He already has a blog post detailing the construction of the UI, as well as a YouTube video of the application.
Narayan Maharjan has blogged about JavaFX Drag and Drop support in ListView.
Geertjan Wielenga has blogged about using JavaFX charts in place of the usual charts in VisualVM.
Geertjan has also recently presented on using JavaFX in pluggable corporate applications.
Stephen Chin was at JavaOne Hyderabad as well, where he presented on JavaFX and HTML 5.
Mohammed Sanaulla has blogged about how he uses JavaFX charts in Swing applications. In a separate post, he also posts part one about developing a simple Todo application using JavaFX, Java and MongoDB.
Dustin Marx has written a JavaFX-Based SimpleDateFormat demonstrator.
Nitin Gupta at e-zest has an article up on ahead of time compilation for JavaFX 2.0 applications.
Anton Epple has added motion blur to his physics-based pinball game.

Scenic View Sneak-peak

Finally, here is the current, in-development version of Scenic View that I am working on with Ander Ruiz. I will release an updated version of Scenic View as soon as all the features are in place.

That’s that for another week. Catch you all next week 🙂

Introducing Scenic View

by Jonathan Giles | May 6, 2012 | General, Layout, Scenic View, UI Design

Update: More recent releases of Scenic View have been released since this post! Go to the Scenic View page to download the latest release!

Developing user interfaces is tricky, regardless of whether you’re just trying to understand the high level scenegraph layout, or whether you’re pushing pixels for a finely tuned user interface. I understand and feel for people in this situation. UI developers come up with all kinds of tricks, for example, temporarily introducing a bold one pixel border of varying colours around components to better understand the user interface. I certainly know I have done that countless times in the past when building user interfaces, and frankly, it is painful and massively time consuming.

Inside the JavaFX team, since times of yore (that is, since at least JavaFX 1.3, but perhaps earlier – my memory fails me here), we’ve had this remarkable little tool that was called Scenic View. It somehow just burst into existence, through the brilliance of Amy Fowler, whom many should know as the layout guru for both Swing and JavaFX. Scenic View is a tool that can be called to browse a live view of the application scenegraph. Here’s a screenshot:

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JavaFX links of the week, April 29

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 29, 2012 | Links

Hi all. The links for this week are up a day early because I have an early flight to catch tomorrow on my way to JavaOne Hyderabad. Conversely, next weeks links will be a day or three late as I will be traveling back home. Therefore, I think everything balances out 🙂 Let’s get on with the links.

Oh – by the way – if you’re at JavaOne Hyderabad next week and you spot me, come up and say hello. I really love chatting to people, but I can’t pick the JavaFX fans from the Java EE people….and I have nothing to say to Java EE people 🙂

JavaFX 2.1 was released this week. Along with the release, the JavaFX team included release notes, and a huge number of new articles on the JavaFX documentation site.
I interviewed Peter Zhelezniakov regarding his work in the JavaFX team on the WebView component.
Angela Caicedo has released part three of her video series on building your first JavaFX application.
Kai Wähner asked (and then attempted to answer) ‘When to use JavaFX 2 instead of HTML5 for a Rich Internet Application (RIA)?’
Andy Moncsek has blogged about how to use JavaFX 2.1 from a local maven repository (on OS X).
Jeff Friesen has got an article up on JavaWorld about ‘pixel graphics and JavaFX‘.
Roberto Marquez has explored the animation features in JavaFX, and has a post up discussing the early stages of using these to create a game.

Catch you all next week! 🙂

Announcing JavaFX 2.1

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 27, 2012 | News

JavaFX 2.1 was released yesterday right on schedule, along with the JavaFX 2.1 release notes, and a huge number of new articles on the JavaFX documentation site. From the Oracle press release, here are the key improvements in JavaFX 2.1 (aside from fixing a whole heap of bugs):

Available for Windows and Mac OS X (with Linux support currently as preview release) (See also Henrik Stahl’s blog on Mac OS)
Includes playback of MPEG-4 multimedia containing H.264/AVC video and AAC audio
New WebView support for JavaScript to Java method calls, which enables JavaScript content to leverage Java for demanding operations
Support for enhanced font rendering on LCD displays, including sub-pixel rendering
Additional UI enhancements such as combo box, stacked chart, and application-wide menu bar
Bundled with the Java 7u4 release
Oracle has started the OpenJFX project in OpenJDK as part of the plan to open source JavaFX

Now – onward with JavaFX 2.2!

Interview with Peter Zhelezniakov

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 24, 2012 | Interviews

It’s been a busy few weeks for me with JavaOne Japan in early April, a heap of development work on JavaFX 2.2, and JavaOne India coming up next week. I’ve slightly dropped the ball on interviews during all of this, but here is another interview from a member of the JavaFX team at Oracle. Peter Zhelezniakov is an engineer in the WebView team, where he works on WebView-related JavaFX APIs all the way down to working with the Webkit code that WebView uses under the covers. Enjoy – and feel free to ask WebView related questions here – I’m sure Peter will be happy to help. 🙂

Hi Peter – thanks for offering to be interviewed. Could you please introduce yourself?
I came to the JavaFX team from Swing, where I was working mostly on Look-and-Feels, but also on Swing’s own HTML package.

So you work on the WebView feature of JavaFX. This is a major component of the new JavaFX 2 series of releases – could you please give an overview of what exactly WebView is?
WebView is a JavaFX node used to display Web pages, with the help of the underlying WebEngine object. It is basically a browser component with a richer programming interface: you can for example examine structure of a page, inject arbitrary scripts, or listen to HTML events. Internally it is a Java wrapper around the Webkit open browser engine used by many desktop and mobile browsers.

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JavaFX links of the week, April 23

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 22, 2012 | Links

Welcome to this weeks links roundup. I hope you all find something useful or interesting 🙂

There is a heap of discussion and review requests going on over at the openjfx-dev mailing list – if you are interested you should consider joining. Some topics of interest to readers include talk of adding a canvas node to JavaFX, to allow for immediate mode painting (e.g. Java2D), deployment ideas, and requests for a CSS object model. Also, if you subscribe to this list, you get notification of all changesets to the public code, so you’ll get a heads-up on what is coming in JavaFX 2.1 and JavaFX 2.2.
Jeff Friesen has got up on his soapbox and posted an article over at JavaWorld asking people to please stop the Java desktop FUD.
Jim Weaver has posted about best practices for JavaFX 2 enterprise applications.
Terrence Barr notes something odd: client apps are becoming sexy again! He has a heap of links for you to peruse.
Stephen Chin and Luc Duponcheel recently presented about using JavaFX with Scala. You can check out their slides if you’re interested.
Carl Dea has updated his JavaFX game tutorial to include a link to his source code at Github.
Adam Bien has a code snippet to show how to set the main Stage of a JavaFX application to be transparent.
Geertjan Wielenga has two posts this week. Firstly, he asks whether JavaFX can be used for corporate desktop applications. Secondly, he asks for someone to step up and provide a JavaFX-based music sheet component.

That’s all for this week. Feel free to send me a link if you think you’ve done something that your peers may be interested in. Catch you all next week 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, April 16

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 15, 2012 | Links

Hey everyone – I’m back in the chair this week having just returned from Japan where I presented at JavaOne and then took a vacation. Thanks to Carl Dea for stepping in for me the last two weeks to keep the links flowing, and for also finding a bunch of links for this weeks post. I apologise if your link has been missed (please let me know), and I also apologise if I repeat a link that has already been posted. With that, let’s get into the links! 🙂

Jasper Potts was interviewed by the Java Spotlight podcast whilst we were in Japan. He talks extensively about the recent developer preview release of Scene Builder.
Adam Bien has blogged about building JavaFX 2 using Maven 3.
Tom Schindl has two blog posts up regarding JavaFX and Eclipse xtend being a perfect match, and a sensationally perfect match 🙂
Software4Java.com has got three interesting blog posts about creating custom CSS styling for Mac OS and iOS. This is very cool and I would love to see more people working together in a project to create ‘native’ looks for JavaFX.
Jason Lee will show you how to get Java 7, NetBeans, and JavaFX 2 running on Mac OS X. Well written instructions to get you on your way.
Carl Dea has posted part two of his JavaFX 2 game tutorial.
Sai Dandem of e-Zest blogs about creating a custom calendar control and how to use JavaFX animations to transition regions. (It’s all about clipping). Another blog entry about creating a custom JavaFX TableColumn allowing you to adjust column widths using a percentage similar to a Html table tag element.
Anton Epple has created an A Hello World example in JavaFX and JBox2D. He then has a follow-up blog entry that goes on to demonstrate a way to apply a custom renderer onto nodes called a NodeProvider interface. Another post talks about adding custom components to FXML using BuilderFactory. He then begins experimenting with adding extensibility to the FX Experience tools application, which he then updated in a separate post. Finally, he talks about using Scene Builder to create the desired node designs that he can then use in his pinball application.
introjava posts a very nice example of how to create a ribbon component similar to Microsoft Office applications using JavaFX.

Catch you all next week! 🙂

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ListView, custom cell factories, and context menus

Introducing Scenic View

Announcing JavaFX 2.1

Interview with Peter Zhelezniakov

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