Jonathan Giles

Wow. March 1st, already?! Time flies when you’re cutting code!

For whatever reason, there aren’t so many links this week. Perhaps you all are still digesting last weeks links

I should note again – the call for papers for JavaOne 2010 is rapidly approaching! It closes when the clock strikes midnight on March 14th. I’m looking forward to finding out what submissions get proposed and accepted, but for that to happen, you have to get your submmissions in within the next two weeks! Get cracking

Right, that’s way too much intro, so let’s get into the news. Enjoy

Swing

• Eugene Ryzhikov posts about his Swing Task Dialog, which tries to recreate the look and feel of the Windows Task Dialog component, and I think he has done a nice job at it.
• Geertjan Wielenga carries on his series of posts identifying applications built atop the NetBeans RCP. This week it is a healthcare quality assurance application.

JavaFX

• The JavaFX community is a nice tight-knit group of enthusiasts and developers. Whilst we mostly keep in touch via twitter, we all worry about the people who aren’t part of the twitter community, and who may feel lost and isolated when learning JavaFX. Well, now that JavaFX is an Oracle product, we also mingle in Oracle Mix. Join us if you want to ask questions or just discuss JavaFX.
• The JavaFX Composer team (a NetBeans plugin developed at Sun/Oracle which makes building JavaFX-based graphical forms easier) have started a new blog to publicise their progress as they work towards a final release. Everything I’ve heard from people using it is that it is a great tool, and very, very useful for building quality JavaFX-based software.
• Simon Morris has posted the second tutorial on his website, covering FXD manipulation.
• Rakesh Menon has blogged about some recommended performance optimisations when developing JavaFX applications. These are all very good tips, so do take a moment to make sure you’re aware of them. He plans to maintain this post with similar advice for JavaFX 1.3.
• In another blog post, Rakesh shows off his results from using the JavaFX Composer tool to build a JavaFX-based user interface.
• Drew continues his work on a JavaFX game using Phys2D. This week he updated the graphics, and also added some effects to his game.
• I happened upon this website recently, which is just a single (but rather long) page outlining all of the JavaFX Script syntax. It seems like a very good reference for anyone new to the language.

That’s us for another week. Keep up the good work folks, and I look forward to seeing you all again in a week 

The weeks seem to be speeding by these days, and the amount of interesting news each week is only growing. This week there is a number of good reads, which I’ve linked to below. As always, thanks to the people who email me links, and please feel free to follow me on twitter if you are interested.

Anywho, enough personal links! On with what you came to see. Enjoy

General

• Kas Thomas has a post discussing why he thinks modal dialogs are evil. As he says, and what I believe, is that they aren’t completely evil if used in appropriate circumstances. But he does have an example of where they really shouldn’t be used.

Swing

• Damien Ielsch continues with his posts, this week with a post titled Bean Reader JTable, discussing how to populate a table of read-only beans.
• Fellow kiwi Nigel Charman has posted about creating executable specifications for Swing apps with Concordian and FEST.

JavaFX

• Lukas Hasik has noted that NetBeans 6.8 Patch 1 has been released. This release includes 36 fixes in the JavaFX area.
• A new article was posted on JavaFX.com that discusses how to profile JavaFX applications using NetBeans.
• In the Sun Developer Network, another article has appeared, titled ‘Java Applets, ASP.net – Can you play together?’. No prizes for guessing the topic of this post.
• Jim Conners has posted a good article titled ‘JavaFX, Sockets and Threading: Lessons Learnt‘.
• Thomas Butter emailed me to let me know of his project to display Open Document Presentation files in JavaFX. It’s only an early preview at the moment, but shows real promise.
• Drew has a small update to his game project where he introduces a pause feature, and explains how he integrated it.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has a post which shows off his integration of JavaFX and Swing into a single application.
• Max Katz has a post showing off his work in using JavaFX as a visual display language for JSF pages.
• Rakesh Menon has posted about the download service listener feature that was part of the Java 1.6.0_18 release. As he notes, “it allows you to provide a Custom Progress UI using AWT/Swing/Java2D APIs. It has callback methods which will provide information related to download and validation of resources.”
• Jonathan Merritt posted about his experience in getting to know JavaFX, and his eventual realisation that JavaFX is very good.
• Following my mention of the need for more Keyboard Cat JavaFX applications, Simon Morris (author of the JavaFX in Action book) obliged and posted another demo which will draw ripples over a video when you click the mouse.
• kdgregory has a post discussing parts of the JavaFX language that he finds interesting.

Wow, this weeks news certainly appears a little lop-sided, but that’s the way it was this past week. Keep up the good work people, and I’ll catch you all again in a weeks time.