JavaFX links of the week, April 19

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 18, 2010 | Links

It’s time for another weeks worth of links from the JavaFX world. This week we have a range of different articles, so hopefully there is something for everyone. Enjoy.

Just a FYI: for the next two weeks I’m in Silicon Valley so whilst I’ll try to post new links I can’t guarantee anything. Be prepared for some silence, and perhaps follow me on twitter – perhaps I’ll post interesting links straight to there for a few weeks as well.

• Robert Eckstein has just put out an article on the Sun Developer Network website covering JavaFX 1.2 UI controls, particularly Buttons.
• Sten Anderson has blogged about flipping nodes with the JavaFX PerspectiveTransform. This is a good read (aside from the Nickelback images), as it gives a few pointers you may not realise otherwise.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about creating a generic OAuth implementation in JavaFX. This might be a very useful starting point for people who intend to connect to OAuth-based web services in JavaFX.
• The Exadel JavaFX Plug-In for Eclipse has been featured on Javalobby.com. If you want to develop JavaFX in Eclipse, you should consider this plugin.
• Cedarsoft have posted some tips and tricks about building controls in JavaFX. It extends from a post I did last year, and I know it has proven useful to some people who have come to me with problems building controls recently.
• itssmee has created a JavaFX-based dashboard that shows how the UK economy has progressed over the last 10 or so years. It’s quite an interesting, if a little limited (and slow).
• Mark Anro Silva has posted two code snippets. The first one is a simple effect example, and the second what he refers to as a ‘preloader‘, but from the looks of it is a loading screen.

That’s all folks. Catch you in a weeks time…..hopefully.

JavaFX links of the week, April 11

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 11, 2010 | Links

Wow – this weeks post has a number of really good links for people who are interested in JavaFX. Let’s get right into them!

• Just a reminder: Stuart Marks is presenting at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group on April 14 at the Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores. Remember, you can also watch the presentation live online, time zones permitting 🙂 For those that don’t know Stuart, he is a member of the JavaFX Controls team, and he’s been at Sun nearly as long as I (Jonathan) have been alive (give or take one year) 🙂
• Rakesh Menon has created a modal dialog in JavaFX, and it actually works very nicely (with the constraints present in JavaFX 1.2). Check it out if you need a modal dialog for your application.
• Stephen Chin has announced the release of JFXtras 0.6, which is a long time in the making and as such has a heap of new stuff. Check out Stephen’s post to find out more details. Somewhat embarrassingly my menu control turns up in there. Apologies in advance to anyone using that set of controls 🙂 As noted elsewhere, improved menu controls turn up as previews in JavaFX 1.3.
• Speaking of new JavaFX controls, I stumbled upon the MindFusion UI Pack for JavaFX this week which is a commercial controls pack for JavaFX. My only comment: be weary as to whether this’ll work in JavaFX 1.3 before splashing out some cold hard cash for it.
• Eric J Bruno has published an article on Dr Dobbs titled ‘JavaFX Database Programming with Java DB‘.
• A new release of the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse has been released, taking it up to version 1.2.4.

That’s things for another week – I hope you enjoyed these links. As always, keep up the hard work folks and I’ll catch you all in a weeks time.

JavaFX links of the week, April 5

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 4, 2010 | Links

Another week, another bunch of interesting links. This weeks standout links are probably the blog post by Stuart Marks, and Simon Morris‘ new XML library for JavaFX. What do you think – was there better or bigger JavaFX news in the last week? If so, leave a comment and let us know!

• The JavaFX geeks and newbies forum passed a milestone this week, seeing member number 200 sign up. This is most probably the best community-driven site related to JavaFX around right now. Join up and join in on the discussions!
• Stuart Marks has posted a very useful blog post about function return type inference in JavaFX. The basic premise: always declare the return type of all functions, and indeed the type of all variables. It just makes life easier and more predictable.
• Simon Morris has just released a LGPL project he calls Arkles, which is a “new library that takes advantage of JavaFX Script’s declarative syntax, combining it with a subset of the XPath notation, to create a more natural and manageable way to process XML documents in your JavaFX applications”.
• Stephen Chin has announced that the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group presentations are now able to be watched in Ubivent, a JavaFX application designed specifically for this purpose, and being used by paying customers. Also, don’t forget to sign up for Stuart Marks’ talk coming up on the 14th. I’ll remind you again in a week.
• Mark Anro Silva has posted a small JavaFX code sample, and video, of an application where he has animated a person walking around the stage.

Keep up the good work folks – we enjoy reading what you’re all up to, and it’s our pleasure to help present your hard work to the public. As always, feel free to contact me if you feel like you want something covered in next weeks post.

JavaFX links of the week, March 29

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 28, 2010 | Links

Wow, a heap of links this week for JavaFX. Also, if you’re remotely interested in JavaOne, it’s important to note that registration is now open for JavaOne 2010. From looking at the session proposals for the JavaFX track, it’s going to be a really good year! Righty, on with the links.

• A lot has been said this week about whether or not JavaFX is ready for the prime time. Coming out to give his perspective on the issue is Adam Bien, who lists 11 reasons why he thinks JavaFX is on the right path.
• Tor Norbye has blogged about transparent windows in Linux, based on his experience in building the upcoming Authoring Tool and testing it across platforms.
• Johan Vos has blogged about map rendering in JavaFX using data from OpenStreetMap. He provides both a runnable demo, and also the code. What’s most fascinating is how little code was actually written to support this – it really is a tiny amount.
• Rakesh Menon created a Wizard UI in JavaFX which is actually quite nice, and certainly usable for people wanting to show wizards in JavaFX.
• Exadel have released version 1.2.3 of the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse. They have also announced that they plan to release more regular, and smaller, updates for the plugin (once every two weeks or so).
• Nathan Erwin emailed me about a Maven Javafxdoc plugin that he has been working on. This allows for you to easily generate JavaFX API documentation as part of the Maven build process.
• Peter Pilgrim has posted a new demo of his Moonlander game, which along with providing a new stage also fixes a few bugs.
• Joshua Smith has blogged about static fields and functions in JavaFX. This is one of those areas that differs from how it is done in Java, but it’s certainly still possible in JavaFX to have static fields and functions.
• If you’re wanting to learn more about JavaFX then Sang Shin has a slide deck titled “JavaFX: Building RIA Application” you should check out. Unfortunately, the ‘Application’ part of the title is a little redundant given the RIA acronym preceding it, but it’s a very easy trap to fall in to.

Hope there was something useful in these links for everyone. As always, feel free to get in touch with us if you have any links or comments you want to share. Catch you all again in a weeks time!

JavaFX links of the week, March 22

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 21, 2010 | Links

Only a few interesting links this week, all included below. Perhaps most interesting is the NetBeans team work on integrating JavaFX code within a NetBeans RCP application.

• Geertjan Wielenga has posted about work the NetBeans platform developers are undertaking to make it possible to embed JavaFX inside NetBeans applications (i.e. built above the RCP).
• Sten Anderson has released the source code for a JavaFX family tree visualiser and a tag visualiser.
• Jim Weaver has updated the JavaFX RIA challenge by changing the deadline to be 30 days after the release of JavaFX 1.3.
• Patrick Champion has continued his series of posts on JPA 2.0 and JavaFX. I’m very, very pleased to see more focus is going on JavaFX breaking into the enterprise. The number of JavaOne proposals I reviewed in this area was staggering, which is, again, very, very pleasing.
• Antoine Mischler has a post talking about how to unit test your JavaFX application using JFrog and Maven. Within Oracle we just directly use JUnit for testing purposes, and that tends to work very well.

Hope you learnt something new this week 🙂 As always, email me any links you may have, and I’ll be back again next week.

JavaFX links of the week, March 15

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 14, 2010 | Links

Not a huge number of links this week in the JavaFX camp, but what we do have below are some very interesting articles in a number of diverse areas. I hope you find them interesting, and as always, please email me any links you would like to have included.

• The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group have announced the next talk to be on April 14 by Stuart Marks, a member of the JavaFX UI Controls team (and therefore a teammate of ours). This will be a very good talk as Stuart is very articulate and precise when answering questions and delving into details.
• JavaFX.com have updated two documents this week: Their article on ‘Shape Intersection, Subtraction, and Union‘ and their tech-tip on ‘Localizing your JavaFX application‘.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about how to layout user interfaces in JavaFX.
• Jeff Frieson has posted about creating his painter’s canvas for mobile devices.
• Max Katz has written about JavaFX and Seam with Flamingo. This article shows how Flamingo letts you easily connect JavaFX with Seam or Spring back-ends.
• Antoine Mischler has posted about how to ‘spice up your JavaFX application with Maven‘.

That’s us for another week. Keep up the great work everyone, and we’ll do our best to keep linking to it.

JavaFX links of the week, March 8

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 7, 2010 | Links

Who would have thought it – I just uncovered another bunch of JavaFX links! Of particular interest to many might be the interview that Oracle did with Nandini Ramani, where she outlines the plans for JavaFX in more detail. Of course, that’s not all the community has in store for you this week – so let’s get right into the news (so I don’t have to keep thinking of something to say 🙂 ).

• Nandini Ramani was interviewed this week on the Oracle Technology Network to discuss the future of JavaFX.
• Stephen Chin did a good blog post discussing the options to open urls in JavaFX in the users web browser.
• Don’t forget that the next Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group is right on our doorstep – it’s on March 10, and as per usual can be attended virtually as well as in Real Life. This months talk is shared with the Silicon Valley Web JUG, which will be talking about the Java Store as well as JFrog Artifactory.
• JavaFX.com has put up two new/updated posts titled ‘Creating a Digital Clock‘ and ‘Shape Intersection, Subtraction and Union‘.
• Exadel have released a new version of their open source JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse, taking the version to 1.2.2.
• The Java Persistency API has had some attention this week, firstly with Patrick Champion blogging about ‘JavaFX and the Databases with JPA 2.0‘, and secondly with Matt Warman stating that JavaFX + JPA = Awesome.
• Rakesh Menon did two posts this week. Firstly he discusses deployment in JavaFX , and secondly he has written a new ‘Carousel’ container.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has posted another video of his JavaFX/Swing mashup application that shows off pan and zoom functionality.
• Enrique Oriol wrote a Rubik’s cube game in JavaFX that looks fairly impressive.

As always, thanks to the people sending in links, it’s always fascinating to see what the community is doing. Keep up the hard work and I’ll see you again in a weeks time.