JavaFX links of the week, November 28

by Jonathan Giles | Nov 27, 2011 | Links

A heap of interesting links this week, so I’m going to skip the introduction and get right into it. Enjoy! 🙂

• Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein has done another JavaFX 2.0 benchmark using the commonly favoured bubblemark animation test. As always, his findings are in-depth and well worth reading.
  
• Daniel Zwolenski (aka Zonski) has put up an early access release of his JFX Flow project. You can find the blog post announcing it here, the project site here, and the Google project here.
• Mark Stephens put up a teaser about a project he is working on to enable rendering PDF files inside JavaFX using the JavaFX scenegraph.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has put up some simple util methods to convert to and from BufferedImage in JavaFX. Just a word of warning: this uses impl_* methods.
• Rob Mayhew has blogged about showing fading status messages in JavaFX 2.0.
• Carl Dea has announced a book he is releasing through Apress in December titled “JavaFX 2.0: Introduction By Example“.
• Enrique García has a sample application showing JavaFX integration with Phys2D.
• Speaking of physics, Bertrand Goetzmann has put up the Groovy source code for the Grezi physics demo (which uses JBox2D, another physics library). You can also watch a video of it.
• Gail Anderson has blogged about the importance of JavaFX properties.
• This week Johan Vos and I put out a slight revision to the DataFX project, pushing it up to 0.0.4. This release includes increased CSS styling support for table rows, as well as early OSGi deployment support.

That’s all folks. Keep up all the great work and I’ll be back in a weeks time to cover everything that happens this coming week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, November 21

by Jonathan Giles | Nov 20, 2011 | Links

Welcome to another week! 🙂 There is a heap of good links this week – it seems the quality of blog posts is certainly increasing these days! Keep it up folks 🙂 As always, I hope you enjoy some of the links below, and always feel free to email me links to include.

• I mentioned last week that the ThingsFX Swing-in-JavaFX project didn’t support key events, but that it was coming soon. In actual fact, I was wrong – it is already supported.
• Speaking of ThingsFX, one of the members of that team, Roman Kennke, blogged elsewhere about the Swing in JavaFX integration, and even put up a demo applet that shows the current implementation. As you’ll note, it is a little slow, but it shows a lot of promise once faster options are made available.
• Tom Schindl has released e(fx)clipse 0.0.8, and now e(fx)clipse also has an official website. This project is very exciting, so if you are an eclipse user and want top-notch JavaFX tooling support, you should check this out and provide feedback.
• Zonski continues blogging about his research and development with JavaFX 2.0. This week he talks about file downloading in JavaFX 2.0 (over HTTP).
• Johan Vos has blogged about visualizing REST XML data in JavaFX controls, making use of the DataFX project.
• Tom Eugelink follows up his JavaFX 2.0 bubblemark explorations after being told of a runtime switch for JavaFX 2.0 that removes the 60fps limit that JavaFX imposes.
• The slide deck that Stephen Chin and Peter Pilgrim used at Devoxx 2011 for their “JavaFX 2.0 – A Developer’s Guide” session is available online for those interested.
• Patrick Champion blogged about extending a JavaFX 2.0 control to add functionality. I should probably add that their are simpler ways to doing this in many cases, which I covered in a JavaOne talk called “Custom UI Controls and Charts with JavaFX 2.0“.
• Andre Hogenkamp has posted a second blog post about running JavaFX 2.0 in Linux (whilst awaiting official support from Oracle).
• Scott Hommel has blogged about using the JavaFX Screen API to determine the dimensions of the users screen.
• Eric Bruno blogged about JavaFX 2.0 binding APIs. Whilst it is a good blog to cover the main concepts of binding in JavaFX, it skips over some simpler options that are possible for the specific use case mentioned in the post. For example, rather than bind the TableView width/height to the scene width/height properties (and place them inside a Group layout), if a StackPane is used instead the TableView will grow automatically without needing any bindings. Similarly, some controls have their max width/height set to the pref width/height, so it is simply a matter of calling, say, button.setMaxHeight(Double.MAX_VALUE) to have them grow automatically when placed in a relevant layout.
• I’ve come across two JavaFX-related projects on GitHub that people may be interested in, but unfortunately no related websites for further details. Firstly, user ‘nahi’ has JRubyFX, and user ‘skrb’ has SVGLoader. Fortunately the project names are fairly self-explanatory 🙂

Keep up the great work folks. Catch you all in a weeks time.

JavaFX links of the week, November 14

by Jonathan Giles | Nov 13, 2011 | Links

Here we go again – this week there are a heap of JavaFX links, so I’m just going to get right in to it – enjoy! 🙂

• Kai Tödter has blogged about ‘Eclipse 4.x RCP + JavaFX Renderer‘. Of particular interest is the three screenshots, that show quite different styling in JavaFX that is achieved with minimal changes to the CSS.
• Mario Torre did a quick status update blog post about the work he and his colleagues are doing to allow for Swing to be embedded within a JavaFX scene. The latest post indicates that they now have proper focus support, and that they are next planning on adding keyboard events.
• In a separate post, Mario showed a small demo application he created that shows JavaFX creating 3D scenes (in the sense that you’ll need 3D glasses to see the effect).
• Roman Kennke created a HyperTree renderer in JavaFX. Both the source code, and a live demo, are available for your viewing pleasure.
• Niklas Hofmann has put up a PDF detailing the JavaFX properties and binding API.
• Rob Mayhew has blogged about JavaFX 2.0 layout using MigLayout / MigPane.
• Tom Eugelink has ported the bubblemark benchmark to JavaFX 2.0, and has some interesting findings.
• Lawrence McAlpin has blogged about ‘cooler javaFX kreations‘, which demonstrates use of animation, controls and FXML.
• Andre Hogenkamp has blogged about a (hacky) way of getting JavaFX 2.0 to work in Linux, whilst the official support is still forthcoming. It involves using Wine, and obviously has limitations.
• Bertrand Goetzmann has put up another video showcasing his Grezi application, this time making use of GraphViz to lay out nodes in the scene.
• Johan Vos and I put up a new release of DataFX, taking the release version to 0.0.3. This release has updated RedFX support, as well as the TableViewFactory class that can help auto-configure a TableView for you. I plan to continue to improve this class as time allows, as it is very minimal right now.

Well, that’s it for another week. Hope you found something useful. Catch you in a weeks time! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, November 7

by Jonathan Giles | Nov 6, 2011 | Links

Another week, another round of links from the JavaFX world. I hope you all find something of interest. Enjoy! 🙂

• Continuing on from last weeks mention of the OpenJFX project being ‘formally discussed’, it has now been formally proposed as an OpenJDK project. Voting is currently underway, with voting closing on November 16. Following this, if everything goes to plan, the first release of JavaFX source code (the UI controls library) will follow shortly thereafter.
• A new JavaFX 2.0 Mac OS Developer Preview release came out last week, taking the build number up to 07.
• The ThingsFX project was launched this week by Robert Branchat, Mario Torre, and Roman Kennke. This project is the new home of the link I blogged about last week where they have enabled embedding Swing inside JavaFX (the opposite of what is supported natively in JavaFX). They also put up a few blogs about this feature. Firstly, they demonstrated embedding a Swing button inside JavaFX, then JFreeChart inside JavaFX, and finally an image processing example.
• Tori Wieldt, blogging for The Java Source, has blogged on the topic of ‘What is JavaFX?‘. Of particular interest to many, she links to a number of upcoming talks at various conferences.
• FXForm2, a dynamic JavaFX 2.0 form generation library, has been updated.
• Zonski continues his explorations of JavaFX with FXML in a blog post titled ‘Client Server with JavaFX 2 and Hessian (+Guice +FXML)‘.
• Wayne Young has a post about configuring JDeveloper for JavaFX 2.0 development.
• Gail Anderson continues her series of blog posts, this week her post covers adding animation with JavaFX.
• Peter Pilgrim has put online a video walkthrough of using ScalaFX.
• Narayan has blogged about a way to enable saving a JavaFX node or scene to an image file.

That’s all for another week. Keep up the great work folks and I’ll be back in a weeks time to highlight everything you’ve been up to! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, October 31

by Jonathan Giles | Oct 30, 2011 | Links

Here we go for another week! 🙂 It seems the number of JavaFX links is really starting to pick up after JavaOne. The most notable news this week was that Oracle has started the open source discussion. Find all the details, and plenty of other interesting links, in this weeks JavaFX links roundup!

• This week we made our next move along the road of open sourcing JavaFX, with Richard Bair posting a message to the OpenJDK discuss mailing list. Additionally, he blogged about the plans. As we’ve mentioned, we really encourage your feedback and participation in this project!
  
• Zonski continues his series of blogs on FXML and controller injection (with Guice). This week there are four blog posts from him: “Multiple Controllers with Shared Resources“, “Views within Views, Controllers within Controllers“, “Generic Controllers“, and “Better Controller Injection with Guice“.
  
• Mario Torre blogged about work he and two colleagues have been doing to enable embedding Swing inside a JavaFX application (the opposite of what is officially supported in JavaFX 2.0 using the JFXPanel component). Whilst not available currently You can see their work over at their GitHub repo, and elsewhere they have announced a willingness to contribute this back in to the open source JavaFX project.
• Tom Eugelink has announced an updated release of MigLayoutFX2 (also known as MigPane). This release adds support for the final JavaFX 2.0 release.
• Kai Tödter has shown off the power of the JavaFX CSS styling functionality by making a dark style and showing how little CSS is required.
• The JavaFX team has its ears to the ground – we hear your feedback! The most recent example of this is the changes we’ve made to the need to have an OTN account to download the JavaFX 2.0 SDK. As announced earlier this week, this is no longer required.
• Along the same lines, the JavaFX documentation team is seeking your feedback on what you want them to write about. These guys do an amazing job, and they are always trying to find new documentation topics. If you feel something is under-documented, talk to them and you may just find a whole heap more documentation will start appearing on this topic.
• Steve Northover (previously involved with SWT, now working in the JavaFX team) has a talk at EclipseCon Europe 2011 on “JavaFX Past, Present and Future and Interop with SWT and Swing”. The talk is next week.
• Stephen Chin discusses JavaFX and the state of client-side Java in a YouTube video posted by O’Reilly.
• Gail Anderson has put up a blog post on building a JavaFX ‘Sketch Pad’ application using custom binding.
• Wayne Young has been playing around with JavaFX, most notably creating a JavaFX application that integrates JBox2D physics, a side scroller  (with update), and a ‘crazy bookshelf‘. In all cases the code is there for you to explore and experiment with.

Hope you all enjoyed the links – catch you all in a weeks time! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, October 24

by Jonathan Giles | Oct 24, 2011 | Links

Having been traveling for the last three weeks, I’ve not been able to post the weekly JavaFX links roundup. Today I’m trying to make up for this by posting all the links I gathered as I was traveling (and on vacation). There are two problems with this approach: 1) what follows is basically information overload, and 2) I almost certainly missed links. I hope you can all forgive me for this one time, and I also hope you find a heap of interesting links in this post (it took me a looonnggg time to write this week!).

Whilst I’m here, I must note that it was great meeting so many people at JavaOne. The number of times I was speaking to someone who didn’t know me, only to see my name badge and know exactly who I was because of this blog was actually very impressive. I’m surprised so many of you read this blog! Anyway, with that (and because this post is already long enough) let’s get straight into it… 🙂

• The big news out of JavaOne for JavaFX was the general availability release of JavaFX 2.0 for Windows, and the beta release of JavaFX 2.0 for Mac OS X. A number of sites posted articles relevant to this.
• Following hot on the heels of the JavaFX 2.0 release is JavaFX 2.0.1, which is a security-only update released in-sync with all other Java security updates (which explains why it was released so soon after 2.0).
• We’ve also put out another build of JavaFX 2.0 beta for Mac OS X, taking the build number up to version 5.
• My partners in crime here at FX Experience, Richard Bair and Jasper Potts, have been busily blogging, including posts titled “Don’t use impl!“, “JavaFX Technical Keynote at JavaOne Video“, “JavaFX sessions at JavaOne 2011 online“, “FXML: Why It Rocks, And The Next Phase“, and “Correctly Checking KeyEvents“.
• A number of blogs have appeared online related to JavaFX FXML being used in conjunction with dependency injection frameworks. Firstly, Tom Schindl has blogged about JavaFX FXML and Google Guice. Following this, Richard Bair blogged about exactly the same topic. Finally, Zonski has blogged about JavaFX FXML and Spring, and in a separate post, ‘better controller injection‘.
• Speaking of Jasper, he was recently interviewed by the Java Spotlight podcast regarding the JavaFX 2.0 release.
• The Oracle Media Network has five videos related to JavaFX 2.0 features: graphics, UI controls, animation, effects, and embedding web content.
• Tom Schindl has also been very busy on his e(fx)clipse project, putting out version 0.0.7, which includes a number of new features, including new wizards, live preview support for editing his ‘FXGraph’ DSL, auto-completion of FXGraph, support for dependency injection, and the start of an application framework.
• Mr LoNee has blogged about a similar feature as mentioned above – a ‘NodeCodeEditor‘ that live previews what is happening as code is being edited (although there are constraints, so be sure to read the blog post completely).
• Jide Software has released a free-to-use JavaFX RangeSlider control (that is, a Slider that has two thumbs rather than one). All I can say is keep up the great work! I want to see a thriving 3rd party controls ecosystem in JavaFX! 🙂
• At JavaOne we demonstrated JavaFX running on various tablet devices. Whilst this is not in any public roadmaps yet, there have been a few writeups on this demonstration that may be of interest.
• Another big JavaOne announcement was the plan to open source the entire JavaFX stack through the OpenJDK.
• One of the talks I gave at JavaOne (along with Johan Vos) was about our DataFX project, related to simplifying the population and rendering of ListView/TreeView/TableView controls. Just today I did a better write-up explaining what the project is, and (hopefully) enticing more people to play around with it.
• All JavaOne slides appear to be online for public consumption. I posted a blog post that links to the three talks I gave, as well as a link to the content catalog where you may download all other slide decks.
• Roman Kennke has posted about “JavaFX 2 — The new Swing ? (!)“.
• Bertrand Goetzmann has updated his Grezi application with JavaFX 2.0 GA support, and now uses the latest GroovyFX release. He has put up a video that demonstrates the HTML 5 slideshows feature.
• Patrick Webster has ported a Pac-Man clone that was originally written for JavaFX 1.3.1 to use the new JavaFX 2.0 release.
• Dustin has blogged about the NetBeans 7.1 beta, and how it can be used for developing JavaFX 2.0 applications.
• Hamilton Matos has blogged about ‘Building JSF 2.0 Composite Components Based on JavaFX with NetBeans‘.
• Gail Anderson has two new JavaFX 2.0 blog posts online, both about animation and binding. The first post creates a simple countdown timer, whilst the second post extends the first by adding a progress bar into the mix.

Phew! That’s that for another week. I’ll get back into the regular schedule starting next week, so hopefully next weeks posting won’t be as great an ordeal (for you and me!) next week. Catch you all in a weeks time folks 🙂