by Jonathan Giles | Jul 14, 2011 | Interviews
It was my pleasure to recently come across the GroovyFX project, which works to make building JavaFX 2.0 user interfaces easier and more powerful from the Groovy language. I decided to reach out to the two main developers to see if they would kindly answer some questions relating to this project. Fortunately they agreed, and so here today we have the first interview on FX Experience. Enjoy!
Please introduce yourselves
Jim Clarke: I have been working with JavaFX for several years and am co-author of JavaFX-Developing Rich Internet Applications.
Dean Iverson: I work at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute where I work with various rich client technologies. I was an early adopter of JavaFX and a co-author of Pro JavaFX Platform.
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by Jonathan Giles | Jul 10, 2011 | Links
Welcome to another week of JavaFX links! 🙂 Let’s get right into it.
- There was a new beta build of JavaFX 2.0 put out this week – b34 includes drag and drop support, as well as a Java to JavaScript bridge for WebView among the numerous bug fixes, API tweaks and performance improvements.
- The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group is planning another meeting this week, but I’m not sure what the topic is. It is on Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 6:00 PM at the Oracle Conference Center.
- Tom Schindl has released e(fx)clipse 0.0.2, which includes improved CSS editing support, as well as the start of better JavaFX integration into Eclipse in the form of JavaFX library specification in projects, a ‘New JavaFX Project’ wizard and JavaDoc integration.
- jojorabbit4 has updated his ComboBox control to allow for more customisation.
- Narayan Gopal Maharjan has put up a AutoFill TextBox with support for as-you-type filtering and auto-complete.
- The GroovyFX project is continuing to get noticed – this week hideaki-t put up a custom browser using GroovyFX to demonstrate the power of GroovyFX and JavaFX.
I hope you all found something useful in this weeks link roundup. Keep up all the hard work folks, and I’ll be back in a weeks time to link to you all over again.
by Jonathan Giles | Jul 3, 2011 | Links
July already?! I know I say this often, but man, where does time go?! Also, happy Independence Day to the American readers out there (even though it’s technically not until tomorrow in your part of the world).
There are a heap of links, so lets jump right into it! 🙂
That’s all for another week. I hope you all found something useful! Until next week – keep up the hard work folks 🙂
by Richard Bair | Jul 2, 2011 | API Design, General
For the past couple of years the industry has continued to follow Moore’s Law by shifting from CPU clock speed to increasing the number of cores and threads per core. Even cell phones are getting multiple cores these days! Taking advantage of all these cores and threads is one of the hallmarks of modern GUI platforms. But all this concurrency brings a multitude of problems to the application developer, not least of which is that writing multithreaded applications is hard!
In designing JavaFX 2.0, we of course needed to address both how the scene graph would behave in the presence of multiple threads, and how developers could effectively do work in background threads and keep the UI responsive. In short, the JavaFX scene graph, like all other mainstream GUI toolkits, is not thread-safe and must be accessed and manipulated from the UI thread (call the FX Application thread). Swing and AWT had the same basic policy (only work with Swing or AWT from the Event Dispatching Thread), as did SWT (only interact with SWT resources and components from the thread that owns them), as do all other major toolkits (JavaScript / HTML included).
The most common problem with this design is that developers who do not do work on background threads invariably create unresponsive applications, since this long lived (potentially blocking) code happens on the same thread that processes user events. That is, while your long lived operation is running, no mouse or key events are being processed, which leads to an application that appears to “hang”.
Further, actually writing well behaved background workers is difficult and error prone. Even if you create a Runnable and create a Thread and do your long-lived work in that background thread, at some point you need to communicate back to the UI, either with the result of the long-lived computation, or by communicating to a ProgressIndicator of some kind what the progress of this long-lived operation is. This is error prone, because you must be sure to communicate with the UI by putting events back onto the event queue (using Platform.runLater, the equivalent of Swing’s invokeLater).
Note: This article is a sneak peek at a new API which is coming in the next couple of weeks, but is not currently available in the Beta builds! There is a deprecated Task class in the beta builds which will be removed and replaced with the one detailed here.
Suppose we have a simple background thread which just counts from 0 to 1 million. Suppose I have a single ProgressBar, and that I need to update the progress of this ProgressBar as the counter runs. A naive implementation might look like this:
final ProgressBar bar = new ProgressBar();
new Thread(new Runnable() {
@Override public void run() {
for (int i=1; i<=1000000; i++) {
final int counter = i;
Platform.runLater(new Runnable() {
@Override public void run() {
bar.setProgress(counter/1000000.0);
}
});
}
}
}).start();
This is a hideous hunk of code, a crime against nature (and programming in general). First, you’ll lose brain cells just looking at this double nesting of Runnables. Second, it is going to swamp the event queue with little Runnables — a million of them in fact. Clearly, we needed some API to make it easier to write background workers which then communicate back with the UI.
Java comes with a very complete set of concurrency libraries in the java.util.concurrent package. We wanted to leverage what was already defined in Java, but we needed to extend these APIs to take into account the FX Application thread and the constraints that GUI programmers are under. The javafx.concurrent package contains three core files: Worker, Task, and Service.
Before diving into the rather verbose description (taken from the proposed javadocs) for Worker, Task, and Service I wanted to cut to the chase and show some examples. The first key thing to mention, is that Worker is an interface that is implemented by both Task and Service, and which adds the sort of convenience API necessary for a background worker that is useful for communicating back with a UI. Second, Task extends from java.util.concurrent.FutureTask. This means that a Task can very cleanly fit into the concurrent libraries. As you may know, FutureTask implements Runnable, and can be passed to an Executor’s execute() method.
So real quick, here is the same example as above, but it suffers from none of the flaws exhibited in the naive implementation.
Task task = new Task<Void>() {
@Override public Void run() {
static final int max = 1000000;
for (int i=1; i<=max; i++) {
updateProgress(i, max);
}
return null;
}
};
ProgressBar bar = new ProgressBar();
bar.progressProperty().bind(task.progressProperty());
new Thread(task).start();
In this example, I first create my Task. The task implementation just does its work, invoking the protected updateProgress method defined on Task, which ends up updating progress, totalWork, and workDone properties on the Task. I then create my ProgressBar and bind its progress property with the progress property of the Task. Then, since Task is a Runnable, I can just create a new Thread passing it the Task and then start the Thread.
Alternatively, I could create an Executor or ExecutorService (such as a ThreadPoolExecutorService) and execute the task using the ExecutorService.
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by Jonathan Giles | Jun 26, 2011 | Links
Here we go again, with this weeks batch of links. Thanks to the people contacting me with links and praise – it’s all much appreciated 🙂 Anyway, let’s get into things…
- There is an Oracle webcast coming up on the 30th of June that is titled ‘The Code of Enterprise Success Begins with JavaFX 2.0‘. It features Jai Suri and Jasper Potts talking about JavaFX 2.0, and might include some interesting news and demonstrations.
- Tom Schindl has announced e(fx)clipse. The 0.0.1 release is minimal but no doubt useful for JavaFX 2.0 developers choosing to use Eclipse: it introduces a CSS editor that supports the JavaFX -fx extensions.
- Jim Connor has blogged about translating a JavaFX Script application to JavaFX 2.0.
- Stephen Chin continues to present the ‘JavaFX 2.0 With Alternative Languages‘ talk at conferences. He has just posted the slides for his talk at Jazoon, where he covers using JavaFX 2.0 with Groovy, Clojure, Scala, Fantom and Visage.
- Speaking of alternate languages, probably the one leading the pack is the GroovyFX project, which obviously provides improved Groovy support. They’ve just put up a heap of documentation that demonstrates how to use the JavaFX APIs using GroovyFX – be sure to check it out!
- Artem Ananiev has covered how to size your windows in JavaFX 2.0 easily.
- Seyhan Basmacı has blogged about building a JavaFX 2.0 sample application, which features a login form as well as a TableView, communicating with a remote server.
- jojorabbit4 has blogged about creating a custom JavaFX 2.0 ComboBox control. For what it’s worth, I spent a few hours this past weekend creating one as well, which may turn up somewhere sometime soon. I even posted an image or two to tease its current state (which is: unfinished, but much better than nothing).
- Laurent Nicolas has blogged about creating a simple JavaFX 2.0 slide presenter.
- Narayan has written about masking in JavaFX 2.0.
That’s all for this weeks folks. Keep up the blogging and exploring of the Java desktop APIs. Catch you in a weeks time! 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Jun 20, 2011 | News
Time to hit the Oracle download servers for a brand new build of the JavaFX 2.0 beta. This build brings with it 2 weeks of bug fixes, optimisations and features. If you’re on an older release (b28 or b30), it’s time to get downloading! 🙂
Also, thanks to everyone filing bugs and feature requests into our Jira issue tracker. It’s your feedback that we’re using to polish the beta releases. I hope that you’ll keep providing your useful feedback throughout the beta release train.
by Jonathan Giles | Jun 19, 2011 | Links
Another week of JavaFX links – hopefully you all find something of interest. Also, thanks to everyone emailing me links!
That’s all I have for you this week. I’ll see you in a weeks time 🙂
by Richard Bair | Jun 14, 2011 | General
I was just going through the bug database and realized that, to my knowledge, we’ve never actually told people what the code names are for our releases, and that that is pretty useful to know when filing bugs. Ever since JavaFX 1.0 we’ve used street or area names from San Francisco as our code names. Honestly I can’t remember the 1.0 code name anymore. 1.2 was called “Marina”, 1.3 was “SoMa” (South of Market).
This release, 2.0, is called “Presidio”, and the next major release is called “Lombard”. So when you see that your issue is targeted at one of these, you know what we’re taking about! If it remains “untargeted”, then it has gone into the pool from which we draw features for future releases, but may not be targeted to a specific release until later in the planning cycle.
by Jonathan Giles | Jun 12, 2011 | Links
Another week, another batch of links. Let’s just get right into it!
- GroovyFX was announced this week by Jim Clarke, which is a library that makes building JavaFX 2.0 user interfaces easier (when written in Groovy, obviously). The features include a SceneGraphBuilder, TimelineBuilder, bind syntax and a GroovyDSL to support colors, durations, timelines, enumerations, etc. I’m very excited to see alternate JVM languages starting to adopt JavaFX 2.0 now that it is all Java-based.
- Speaking of alternate JVM languages, here are two blog posts by Emil Kruczek about using JavaFX 2.0 in Clojure.
- Tom Schindl has taken JavaFX 2.0 for a spin, and thinks that JavaFX 2.0 is looking pretty good, which is kind considering he is an SWT fan. Despite this, he says that “[t]his makes me a bit sorry about SWT because compared to what JavaFX provides to me SWT is light years behind.”
- In a separate post, Tom blogs about using Xtext to create a JavaFX-CSS editor, which, he theorises, could quite nicely become part of an Eclipse JavaFX 2.0 plugin (along with other Eclipse-based techonologies).
- Rafał Rusin has blogged about visualising GIS data in JavaFX 2.0 beta using GeoTools.
- I put up a link to my in-progress JavaFX Control Cell Factories project. Currently you can just check out the (clearly beta quality) screenshots and see what the API looks like (hint: fully static API with a lot of Callbacks – I can’t wait for closures to clean this up!).
That’s all for another week. I hope you all found something useful in the links above. Catch you again in a weeks time, and keep up all the hard work folks!
by Jonathan Giles | Jun 5, 2011 | Links
Now that JavaFX 2.0 beta has been out for a week or two, and a refresh build already published, the number of links we’re starting to see covering what is going on is definitely increasing, as you can see below. As always, feel free to email me any links you want to have included. Right, this is a big post, so let’s get into it!
- A new JavaFX 2.0 beta build came out this week. I’d recommend to everyone that they update as soon as possible. Just as a heads-up, we’re on a two-weekly cycle for public beta builds, so keep an eye out for new builds as they always include new features, bug fixes and improved performance.
- Nandini Ramani, Vice President of Development at Oracle (a.k.a my bosses boss), has been interviewed by the Java Spotlight podcast, where she talks about the JavaFX 2.0 beta release.
- Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and I have been busy here on FX Experience. We’ve talked about Maps in JavaFX 2.0 (using WebView), and introduced the indeterminate CheckBox and SplitPane controls. We’ve also been posting important links immediately, rather than hold them off for the weekly links roundup.
- Amy Fowler has blogged about the JavaFX 2.0 layout APIs, giving a great introduction to what has changed since JavaFX 1.3. Layout APIs are always a tough nut to crack, but once you do it makes your user interfaces so much easier to build. I highly recommend reading this blog post!
- Artem Ananiev has posted a good introduction to the JFXPanel component, which allows for embedding JavaFX nodes into a Swing application.
- Tom Eugelink has published his MigLayout port for JavaFX 2.0 to Java.net, where it is published under the Apache 2.0 license. Note that in addition to this MigLayout project, JavaFX 2.0 includes a GridPane layout that is also very functional.
- The Silicon Valley JavaFX users group is running another session this week: ‘Hands-on JavaFX Coding in Alternative Languages‘. This talk is being hosted at Oracle HQ on Wednesday, 8th June at 6:00pm. As usual they will be hosting the session online for those of us who can’t attend in person.
- Jeff Friesen has blogged about ‘Rebooting JavaFX, Part 1‘.
- A number of people have posted their first impressions of JavaFX 2.0 this week, including Gerbrand van Dieijen and Illya Yalovyy.
- Lawrence Premkumar has blogged about dynamically setting the side of a TabPane. TabPane is another of the new controls in JavaFX 2.0, which I plan to blog about in more depth sometime soon here.
- jVel has blogged about using custom cell factories in JavaFX 2.0 (Google translate is used). This is another important topic that I intend to cover in more depth in the future here on FX Experience.
As always, keep up the great work blogging folks, and I’ll catch you again in a weeks time.
