JavaFX links of the week, July 5

by Jonathan Giles | Jul 4, 2010 | Links

Wow, July already. Time sure is flying these days. As always, please feel free to flick me an email or a tweet to let me know of any news you want included. Let’s get on with the news!

• Tor Norbye blogged about not using implicit return types in public API declarations in JavaFX, and from my perspective, copped quite an unfair bashing for doing so. He also provided a NetBeans plugin for identifying this issue, and ‘quick fixing’ it. As for the comments on the post: I personally love implicit typing, but not when it is public API, for the reasons Tor identifies. It would suck to have to type :Void for every function and specify the type of all parameters in an overridden function. The language really isn’t broken.
• The Exadel JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse has been upgraded to 1.3.3. In addition to this they’ve blogged about the new ‘go to member’ feature added in 1.3.3.
• Johannes Schneider has announced that he has added his JavaFX2Java bridge to the JFXtras project (in a separate cloned repo). You can find out more about this bridge in another blog posting.
• The Oracle Technical Network interviewed John Jullion-Ceccarelli and Martin Ryzl, two of the managers behind NetBeans 6.9. They discussed the new NetBeans Composer tool for rapid JavaFX application development.
• Srikanth Shenoy has blogged about ‘Effective JavaFX Architecture‘. This is the first part of a series of posts he is promising to do.
• Eviware popped out of nowhere this week with their loadUI application for load-testing webapps. They’ve posted some videos and in general their app, built using JavaFX and Groovy, looks really impressive.
• Oracle announced that JavaFX is powering the Major League Baseball ‘fantasy baseball’ applications, although I haven’t yet seen it in action because I don’t live in the US or Canada (but you can go here to sign up, and presumably play).

That’s it for another week folks. Catch you in a weeks time.

JavaFX links of the week, June 28

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 27, 2010 | Links

A fairly quiet week in the JavaFX world this week, but nevermind, I’m sure it’s just because the majority of you are too busy working on your blog masterpieces for next week 🙂 Regardless, there are some very useful links in this weeks post, so have at it, and as always please do flick me an email (or twitter message) with any link you think is worthy of being included.

• There’s been a bit of a documentation refresh going on recently, with the JavaFX 1.3 API getting refreshed, and a JavaFX CSS reference document being made available at the same time. For more information check out my summary blog post.
• I posted about caching in custom cells in JavaFX controls such as ListView and TreeView. This is (probably) a useful post for people creating custom cells.
• Jim Clarke has blogged about his experimentation with JavaFX and WEBM on Linux.
• Jan-Hendrik Kuperus has blogged the second part of his post on integrating JavaFX with regular Java.
• Mark in your calendars July 14th, which is when Max Katz is talking about enterprise JavaFX.
• Speaking of Max, he has also blogged about the new preferences dialog added to the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse that Exadel, the company he works for, develops.

That’s all folks. Thanks to everyone who took the time to post about what they’re working on, and for those of you who didn’t, I’m looking forward to your blogging masterpieces next week 🙂

Three Useful JavaFX Links

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 25, 2010 | Links

Recently a few useful documents turned up on the web related to JavaFX, so I thought I’d briefly provide the links to them in case you weren’t aware of their existence.

Firstly, the JavaFX team updated the JavaFX 1.3 API documentation. There is a bunch of new content for much of the API, and improved package documentation (which you can see by clicking the arrow on the main page relevant to the package you’re interested in). In particular, the javafx.animation, javafx.scene, javafx.scene.control and javafx.scene.chart packages have a bunch of useful information.

Secondly, with the huge improvements to CSS support in JavaFX 1.3, we’ve published a comprehensive CSS guide. This is a huge resource to people interested in styling JavaFX user interfaces, as it lists all available css properties for each control.

Finally, for those interested in ensuring your coding style is following convention, the best resource is Tor Norbye’s JavaFX coding conventions document. It’s not the definitive style guide for JavaFX, but it is a great starting point. I think there is only one difference between his conventions and what we use internally, and he notes this in the page.

There we go – a few very useful resources that you may be interested in perusing in a spare moment.

JavaFX links of the week, June 21

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 20, 2010 | Links

Welcome to another week of JavaFX links folks. This week there is a good bunch of interesting news and blog posts, so I hope that there is something here for everyone. As always feel free t get in touch with me if you have a link you’d like to have included.

• Stephen Chin announced the first release candidate of JFXtras 0.7.
• Stephen Chin posted links to the videos from the Bay Area JUG Roundup and to Stuart Marks’ ‘Hands-On JavaFX Lab’.
• Speaking of Stuart Marks, he has blogged with some useful details related to applying styles to scenes. This is a must-read for anyone using CSS in JavaFX.
• NetBeans 6.9 was released this week, which has a number of good improvements, with some related to JavaFX. I’m actually finding it very usable for JavaFX, compared to earlier NetBeans releases which were a lot more rough. I hope this awesome pace of development continues! 🙂
• Eric Bruno has posted an article on the JavaFX JDBC datasource.
• The NetBeans folks have documented how to deal with ‘parallel application states and state variables in JavaFX Composer‘.
• Osvaldo Doederlein continues his research into the guts of JavaFX, offering his thoughts on sequences this week.
• I posted a simple example of using a cell factory in the JavaFX TreeView to create a CheckBoxTreeView control.

That’s us for another week. Keep churning out the good posts and news and I’ll keep linking to you. Catch you all in a weeks time.

JavaFX links of the week, June 14

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 13, 2010 | Links

A quieter week this week for some reason, but nonetheless some interesting links are to be had. Keep up the good work folks – it’s great to read what’s going on in the community.

• Johan Vos has announced a new project called RedFX, which is a framework that enables easy connection between JavaFX client-based code and Java Enterprise based backend code. You can read more about RedFX on the project website, but it has also been announced that RedFX will be merged into JFXtras.
• Rakesh Menon has blogged about how to rotate the text on a Chart axis to make it more readable.
• Exadel have put out a new release of the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse, taking it up to 1.3.2.
• itssmee has posted two posts this week, titled ‘Tutorial on how to use JavaFX 1.3 with the Twitter API‘ and ‘how to sort a sequence of objects‘.
• Jo Voordeckers has blogged about one way to possibly improve performance of Java applets in Firefox on the Mac.
• Now I’m not a Spring person, so I can’t offer any editorial insight into this post titled ‘wiring JavaFX objects with Spring‘.

That’s all folks! Catch you all again in a weeks time, and as always feel free to flick me an email, a tweet, or whatever else floats your boat.

JavaFX links of the week, June 7

by Jonathan Giles | Jun 6, 2010 | Links

Another week, another bunch of links. It seems like you lot have been very busy! 🙂

• We introduced two new preview controls in JavaFX 1.3: MenuButton and SplitMenuButton. We also implored you to read Amy Fowler’s recent blog posts on layout in JavaFX 1.3. Finally, we gave the site a bit of a spit-shine, with more visual tweaks to come in the next few weeks – what’ya think?
• The JavaFX docs team have put together a huge article on ‘Tips for developing on the JavaFX TV platform‘.
• Jim Weaver has posted a BorderLayout container that he built as an example of how it is possible to build custom layouts in JavaFX.
• Rastislav Komara has posted about a new feature in NetBeans Composer in the 6.9 RC1 release: grid container support. Note that NetBeans 6.9 RC2 was also released this week.
• Speaking of NetBeans Composer, Antoine Mischler has blogged his thoughts about it, as has Nick Apperbly.
• Stephen Chin has posted his Jazoon slide deck for his recent talk which was titled ‘Building Data Rich Interfaces with JavaFX‘.
• Also related to Stephen is the announcement that the Apropos project has been open sourced. This is an ‘Agile Project Portfolio Scheduler’ written in JavaFX.
• Mikhail Gorshenev has been posting a bunch of JavaFX TV posts recently. They are titled ‘3D Scene Support in JavaFX TV‘, ‘TV-Friendly Focus Traversal‘, ‘Simple CSS Styling‘ and ‘3D Carousel‘.
• Speaking of Mikhail, he is presenting at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group this week. His presentation is called ‘Top Secret JavaFX TV Preview‘. The presentation is on June 9 at 6:00pm PST, at the Oracle Conference Center.
• Osvaldo Doederlein continued his research into the JavaFX scenegraph by continuing the development of his JavaFX Game of Life implementation. Fortunately this week he has more positive things to say about the scenegraph 🙂
• Rakesh Menon, who recently left Oracle to join Cisco, has posted his JavaFX Wish List. All I can say with regard to his wish list is that I know we’re working on improvements to many of his comments!
• Antoine Mischler has blogged about using inversion of control in a JavaFX application.

As always thanks to everyone for the hard work you do, and an extra round of thanks for blogging about it so that we can all learn from your experiences. As always you can email me or find me on twitter if you want to chat. You should also follow the @fxexperience twitter account to be informed of new posts to this site. Until next week – keep up the good work folks! 🙂