Whoa! It is kind of embarrassing that we haven’t yet blogged about the fact that JavaFX 2.0 has been released! In our defense, it has been a very busy past few days. At the JavaOne Technical keynote Monday morning I announced 4 things:

  • GA Release of JavaFX 2.0 (32 bit XP, 32 & 64 bit Windows Vista and Windows 7)
  • Developer Preview release of JavaFX 2.0 for Mac OS X
  • Early Access (for partners) of JavaFX Scene Builder (RAD tool)
  • Netbeans 7.1 Beta with support for JavaFX

In addition, on Tuesday Adam Messinger (VP Java SE, Java Client, Java ME — my bosses boss) announced that we are open sourcing all of JavaFX. We are asking the OpenJDK community for a new project where we will put JavaFX. In addition, we will be working with the JCP to propose JavaFX as an official standard part of the Java platform (probably targeted for Java 9).

There was also a very exciting demo which you probably have already seen, where Nandini Ramani (VP Java Client, my boss) showed JavaFX running on both a Samsung Galaxy Tab (atop Android) and an iPad. Needless to say, this has generated quite a bit of buzz. I’ll blog separately about how this works and why (I gave a session on the subject on Tuesday).

We’ll also be blogging with our slides from the conference. In the meantime, the conference is ongoing, and I’m late for a session I wanted to attend. I’ll also post some slides from the Monday Keynote and Tuesday keynote (if I can get my hands on them)

Here’s a special edition of Java desktop links for folks. I thought, given the fact I’ve accumulated a few good links this week already, and that I’ll be super-busy next week and probably won’t be able to share any links, that I’ll get a post out before I fly out to JavaOne. Enjoy :-)

  • Mean words are being said, battle lines are drawn, and full-on war is nearing…at least in the vicious GroovyFX vs ScalaFX battle for minds and hearts. Stephen Chin started it with his post introducing ScalaFX. He may not have said it, but I’m sure you could tell he was suggesting that ScalaFX was the better choice over GroovyFX….
  • Naturally, Dean Iverson wasn’t going to take this lying down, so he fired up his blog and posted a stinging GroovyFX rebuttal.
  • Backing Dean was Jim Clarke, co-developer of the GroovyFX library along with Dean. Jim has just started a series of blog posts on getting started with GroovyFX.
  • Of course, I’m sure both Stephen and Dean are toiling away on their own implementations. They’ll be meeting head-to-head for a winner-takes-all battle at their JavaOne session next week: ‘JavaFX 2.0 with Alternative Languages’. Unfortunately, this session conflicts with a session I’m giving on ‘JavaFX Data Sources’, but alas, I’m sure you’ll all make the right call.
  • Speaking of the JavaFX Data Sources talk I am co-presenting with Johan Vos, we just put up a website for the related project: DataFX. It is two projects in one: a series of data source adapters to make bring data into JavaFX UI Controls simpler, and a number of pre-built cell factories to make rendering data simpler and richer. Downloads will be enabled next week once we’ve presented our talk.
  • Final warning: next week Peter Pilgrim will be presenting his ‘Progressive JavaFX 2.0 Custom Components‘ JavaOne talk at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group. It’s on Thursday, October 13, 2011, at 6:00 PM. As per usual, it’ll be live streamed for those that can’t attend in person. For the first time, I’m hoping to finally be able to attend in person this month.
  • Tom Schindl has put up a blog post on ‘How to author FXML‘, which demonstrates some work he has done to make developing JavaFX interfaces simpler in his e(fx)clipse project.
  • In another post, Tom has just announced the release of e(fx)clipse 0.0.6. This release incorporates the FXML authoring support mentioned in the previous link, as well as updated CSS support, improved OSGi bundling support, and the beginnings of runtime components (including layout APIs and OSGi support).

Ok, that’s it for this week. I apologise in advance for any lapses in links postings for the next few weeks. I’ll try my best, but I’m really hoping you folks make it easier for me by emailing me any new and wonderful links you may find. Also, as I said last week, I’m really looking forward to catching up with you all next week at JavaOne. If you see me, please come up and chat – the hallway track is by far the most fun part of JavaOne.

Until next time, have a great week, enjoy JavaOne, and I’ll see you on the other side! :-)

Here we are: one week to go until JavaOne starts. There are a number of links this week, but I’m sure there will be a lot of good news coming in the next few weeks. I’ll try my best to get blog posts out whilst I’m traveling, but I can’t guarantee it. I’m away for three weeks from October 1 to October 23.

For those of you coming to JavaOne, I’m really looking forward to catching up with you – if you spot me please come up and chat! :-)

Catch you all at JavaOne, or in another links roundup as soon as I can create it! :-)

Another week, and a lot of good links. Not long now until JavaOne, when I’m sure there will be plenty of interesting news coming out. Let’s get into the news.

  • JavaFX 2.0 beta b45 came out this week. Grab it while it’s hot.
  • The JavaFX documentation team is doing a great job of tracking what is changing between beta builds, and keeping you in the loop. Find out what changed in b44 and b45 over at the JavaFX documentation blog.
  • The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group has a session the week following JavaOne, on Thursday, October 13. This month the presentation is by Peter Pilgrim, repeating a presentation he is also giving at JavaOne. The talk is titled “Progressive JavaFX 2.0 Custom Components“. For the first time, I’ll be able to attend in person, and given that this session talks about custom controls, it’s right up my alley. For those of you who can’t  be there in person, remember it is also live-streamed via UStream.
  • Dean Iverson tweeted that he has released version 0.2 of the Griffon JavaFX 2.0 plugin.
  • The in-development NetBeans 7.1 contains much greater support for JavaFX 2.0, including support for FXML, CSS3, preloaders, and project configuration.
  • Randahl Fink Isaksen, a frequent and valuable reporter of JavaFX 2.0 bugs, has written a post titled “JavaFX eats HTML UIs for breakfast“.

That’s that for another week. Hope you all found something useful! :-)

Here we go, yet another weeks worth of JavaFX links. There are quite a few interesting links this week – so tuck in and enjoy! :-)

That’ll do for another week I think. Catch you all in a weeks time. Keep up the hard work folks! :-)

A heap of interesting links this week, so I hope there is something of interest in the links below for you! As always, feel free to email me your links if you think they are worth sharing to everyone else. Let’s get into things!

  • The JavaFX 2.0 beta builds keep on rolling off the production line. This week we have build 40 ready to be tested. From my point of view, the most exciting thing about this release is the performance improvements we’re starting to get into releases. Our specialised performance team are finding memory leaks and CPU hogs, and the engineers are doing their best to get things as performant as possible. In particular, b40 includes a heap of performance improvements to CSS and controls performance. Of course, there are plenty of bug fixes, and the general polishing that is expected of a relatively late-stage beta release. As always, my plea remains: please get it onto your machine and give it a good thrashing. Bug reports and complaints are highly appreciated!
  • Dean Iverson has been busy posting two screencasts about building GroovyFX applications on to his blog. The first screencast is about how to get started with Griffon, GroovyFX, and JavaFX. The second screencast is concluding the basic introduction, introducing features such as binding, automatically generating properties, and keeping your JavaFX user interfaces as succinct as possible using the power of Groovy.
  • We posted an updated ‘Introducing FXML‘ document. This should hopefully answer some of the questions you have.
  • If the technical documentation above isn’t enough, there is also a ‘Getting started with FXML‘ article on the Oracle JavaFX website. This article works through the process of building a simple, example application and gives a good overview of how to work with FXML.
  • And if that documentation isn’t enough, the JavaFX documentation team at Oracle have just posted a blog about all the new and updated documentation that recently got pushed online. They’re doing an excellent job making sure there is a lot of high-quality documentation about JavaFX 2.0, and my hats are off to them, knowing how much the engineers have increased their workload by changing APIs over the last few months.
  • Tom Schindl has released e(fx)clipse 0.0.3, which includes CSS validation improvements for customising the look of your applications.

Have a great week everyone :-)

I know I sound like a broken record…but where does time go?! It’s mid-August already! This past week was a relatively quiet one in the JavaFX world, but despite being quiet there are some very interesting links this week. Let’s get into it :-)

That’s all for this week – I hope you found a few links useful! Catch you next week with more JavaFX links :-)

Welcome to another week of desktop links. This week there are a number of links, so hopefully there might be some that are of interest to you! Let’s get right in to it :-)

Catch you all in a weeks time :-)

Just a quick post to announce that yet another JavaFX 2.0 beta build has rolled out, this week taking us to build 38. This brings another weeks worth of bug fixes, performance tweaks and necessary API changes (based in no small part on your feedback to our Jira tracker). As always, I look forward to hearing your feedback on this latest release. The best place to discuss JavaFX 2.0 is at the OTN forum, where many of the JavaFX team lurk. However, file your bug reports / request for enhancements directly to our Jira tracker if you want to maximise your chances of being heard!

I was just given notice that we were allowed to share an internal FXML document originally written by Greg Brown, a member of the JavaFX controls team. What follows is a painfully slow (and very labour intensive!) PDF to HTML conversion We’ve updated the document, and instead of re-translating it every time, I will now just be posting the PDF file directly. If you find any mistakes, please leave a comment (or email me), and I’ll update the document. I also have to add the normal disclaimers: this is a draft document, and it is likely that it may change leading up to the GA release of JavaFX 2.0. With that out of the way, read on and enjoy! :-)

Download the latest 'Introducing FXML' document

In case you’re wondering what FXML is, FXML is a scriptable, XML-based markup language for constructing Java object graphs. It provides a convenient alternative to constructing such graphs in procedural code, and is ideally suited to defining the user interface of a JavaFX application, since the hierarchical structure of an XML document closely parallels the structure of the JavaFX scene graph.