I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!
Wow! A great week of links this week, with a number of interesting reads, some interesting code, and another upcoming JavaFX talk coming up real soon now. Here’s the links of the past week:
Richard Bair posted a very simple SplitView ‘control’ for JavaFX that you can easily reuse in your JavaFX applications. It’s not fully-fledged like it would be once it’s developed properly by Sun (so it isn’t skinable, etc), but it can be easily modified to meet your specific needs in the short term.
JavaFX.com has let me know that they’ve put up a number of new and updated how-to’s. This is a great resource for people new to JavaFX.
Simon Morris has updated his JavaFX Wipe Library, which is a collection of transition effects (think Powerpoint slide changing effects – fades, slides, reveals, flip, etc, etc).
Drew has posted a tutorial on how he created a ‘photo drop‘ application in JavaFX which makes use of Phys2D. It’s not the first time I’ve seen Phys2D used in JavaFX, with Richard Bair and Jasper Potts having used it in their Devoxx game, and Simon Morrisusing it for some demos as well.
Rakesh Menon has posted about printing in JavaFX (through using what is available in AWT).
Alexandr Scherbatiy has posted some code he wrote in JavaFX that generates fractals.
I hope that there were some useful links in there for you. Please feel free to email me (jonathan@jonathangiles.net) if you have anything you want to have linked to in a future posting. Until next week – have a great week ahead, and keep up the great work 🙂
We have not yet provided a SplitView Control in JavaFX (and it is not in the plan for 1.3). However, the main reason is that it is relatively simple to write one from scratch so we’re focusing on some of the harder things (like TreeViews). I was asked recently how to go about writing a SplitView in JavaFX, so I decided to write a very short blog post with sample code from a demo I wrote for this past Devoxx. (more…)
Only a few links this week – it seems everyone is still thawing out (in the northern hemisphere anyway – it’s nice and summery down here in New Zealand where I live). So, this week we had four interesting posts:
The marketing folks at Sun email me when things are being announced. They just let me know that a new JavaFX plugin for Eclipse has been released. As per the announcement that’ll sooner or later turn up on the official JavaFX blog:
A new version of the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse IDE has just been released! This latest version is based on the JavaFX 1.2.1 SDK and supports Eclipse 3.5.x IDE. Read the Release Notes to learn more about the changes made since the June 2009 release. Download this latest version using the instructions in the Getting Started document.
Carl Dea has created a poor man’s form designer, and provided both an overview as well as the souce code. By his own admission this is really just him playing around, but who knows, if you like it perhaps you can help grow this into a useful application.
That’s it – short and sweet. It’s good to see too – it means you’re all enjoying your holidays 🙂 Catch you next week!
With Christmas behind us and new years to look forward to, I’m surprised by the amount of news coming out this week. In the interests of brevity (I’m sure most of us have holidays to enjoy), let’s get straight into it.
Video from Richard Bair’s talk to the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group was recently posted, which you can watch here if you’re interested.
Jim Weaver has extended and slightly modified the rules for the JavaFX RIA exemplar competition. The competition deadline is now April 10, 2010, and it is no longer necessary to consist of a team of a programmer and a designer. Get into it as the prize is $2000, and your work will be looked over by a number of big names in the JavaFX world.
Drew has created a simple calendar control in JavaFX. At present it is just a proof of concept and certainly not a fully fledged control, but it shows the ease in which creating new controls is possible. All I can really add is that JavaFX 1.3 will make customising the appearance much easier, as our ListView control can be skinned far more easily – meaning anything list-likecan build upon all the smarts we have put into ListView (and other virtualised controls like Tree and Table).
Jeff Frieson has posted about reading newsfeeds in JavaFX in his normal code-heavy approach. Another good read if you’re keen to see exactly how to interact with RSS/Atom feeds in JavaFX.
As Richard mentioned recently, he had the honor to be the first official speaker at the first JavaFX user group meeting. You can read the slides from this presentation, and now I have decided to post the video here for those of you wanting to watch it but may have missed the live streaming.
Next up on January 13 is Amy Fowler, who will be talking about layout secrets in JavaFX. Note that this presentation is not at Google – this time it is being held at Sun. As with the first talk, you can also watch the presentation live, and participate both in the chat room, and also pose questions that may be answered by Amy at the talk.
Here we go again with another week of the best and most important JavaFX links that we could find on the net. We hope you enjoy, and find them useful.
After a successful first presentation with Richard Bair at the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group, next up to bat is Amy Fowler. She’ll be presenting about layout secrets in JavaFX on January 13. Note that the venue has changed – it is now being hosted at Sun. As with the first presentation, you don’t have to be physically in California to attend – video is broadcast live, and there is an associated chat room. You can find me, as well as a number of other JavaFX developers, in there during the presentation.
Dean Iverson posted a very interesting article investigating how to create custom controls in JavaFX, making use of Caspian code for colors and state transitions (i.e. subtle animations). The only downside is that we’ve changed how things work for JavaFX 1.3, which should make this kind of thing much easier.
Congratulations goes to Jeff Frieson for winning the latest JavaFX coding competition. This months theme was ‘holiday’, and you can see the winning entry at JFXStudio. Next months competition will be announced on new years day.
Speaking of Jeff, he has posted an article discussing how to play with perspectives in JavaFX to attain various effects. You can also find a lot more of this kind of material in the ‘Pro JavaFX Platform’ book published a few months ago.
If you’re wanting to display PDF’s from within JavaFX, today’s your luck day, as JPedalFX is a LGPL-licensed JavaFX PDF viewer. I’m not sure what is going on under the hood, but I’m guessing it’s probably a wrapper around a Swing-based PDF viewer. Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but just keep in mind that this limits the portability of your JavaFX app (both to mobile/tv devices, as well as to the prism graphics stack).
One of the gratifying things about being involved in building a new platform on top of a new language is discovering new language idioms. As an industry we’d managed to put together quite a long list of patterns and best practices for Java, but since JavaFX introduces some new concepts (such as object literal notation) and makes other things really easy to do (binding, closures) it creates an environment where we need to discover the best practices and patterns that make for effective programming in JavaFX.
One such idiom has to do with encapsulation. I was presented with the following problem in a recent email. The developer wanted to create a chunk of scenegraph which looked differently depending on some flag. There would be 10 such flags with 10 such chunks of scenegraph. (more…)
