Welcome everyone to another week. This week there are some really interesting posts, so take your time to read through these links below and enjoy 
Swing
JavaFX
- JavaFX 1.2.3 was released this week. It’s a maintenance release only (which means there are no new toys to play with). This release had a focus on improving performance, reliability, and download time. Various bugs have been fixed as well.
- Long time employee of Sun, and great advocate of both Swing and JavaFX, Josh Marinacci, has announced that he is moving on from Sun/Oracle, taking up a position at Palm.
- Simon Morris has posted an interesting tutorial on how to do advanced clipping in JavaFX. Clipping is something that becomes useful once you understand how to use it, so I recommend finding time to read this article.
- Drew from Piliq.com continues his exploration intophysics-based games. This week he posted progress in adding parallax scrolling and custom cursors, and also an entirely new demo game.
- Speaking of physics games, Mikhail Gorshenev has posted a fun version of Tetris that spices up the original game by requiring you to simply have two or more blocks of the same colour touch. The kicker? The blocks now exhibit physical properties and fall accordingly.
- Alex Ruiz has posted a new release of his FEST JavaFX Maven plugin, bumping the version to 1.0 alpha 1. This is a Maven plugin for compiling JavaFX source files.
- Vyacheslav Baranov writes about the availability (or not, depending on which OS your software is running on) of Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) support in JavaFX 1.2.
- Rakesh Menon has posted sample code to illustrate how to upload files using JavaFX.
- Kon at Outrospective.org has posted an overview of the JavaFX 1.2 charting features.
Well, I hope you enjoyed the links, that they were informative, and that I’ll see you all again next week
Well, the Oracle acquisition of Sun is now done, and I’d like to say hello to my new corporate overlord The good news in the last week is that all the concern around what Oracle was going to do with the various Sun projects has been relatively well clarified. From the sounds of things, investment in Java, JavaFX and NetBeans is going to continue or even grow. Perhaps the biggest (initial) loser is Project Kenai, the Sun cloud-based project hosting project. I know a lot of people have created kenai projects, and it is unfortunate to see this close down.
There is a tonne of news this week, so lets get into it and I hope you enjoy it!
Swing
JavaFX
- Jim Weaver sums up the Oracle news this week nice and succinctly: ‘We will invest heavily in JavaFX‘.
- The JavaFX tutorial has been updated to include a gentler introduction to data binding and triggers, with a new chapter devoted exclusively to “the basics”. Also, apparently there are plans to include a more advanced article discussing this topic also.
- Want tabs in your JavaFX application? Well, today’s your lucky day as toumaille has posted exactly this. His tabbed pane control appears to be well thought out, and may be of use to people out there, certainly until there is an official tab control in JavaFX.
- Drew, carrying on his investigation into JavaFX and physics, has put up a JavaFX applet of a very, very simple platform game using real physics.
- Exadel released a new version of their JavaFX Plug-In for Eclipse, taking it up to version 1.2.1.
- Jim Weaver introduces an interesting visualisation developed in JavaFX by Nik Silver. You can go directly to the visualisation if you are interested in playing with it.
- Simon Morris has put up a page that contains all of the demos he wrote whilst writing his book ‘JavaFX in Action’.
- Pedro Duque Vieira has written about how he has embedded a JavaFX scene into a Swing application.
- Krishna Kishore has created a JavaFX application that grows/animates flowers onto the screen. It’s a rather nice effect, and shows the power of the language given Krishna admits creating this program just to learn the language.
Griffon
- Andres Almiray has announced the release of Griffon 0.3 Beta 2. Griffon 0.3 Beta 2 is mostly a collection of fixes for issues found in the previous beta.
Whew! I did warn you there was a lot of really high-quality news this week. Well, that’s it for another week. Keep up the hard work (but remember to find time to relax too!), and I’ll see you all again next week.
Well, I best start this week by mentioning that the Oracle takeover of Sun is edging very near. The EU appears to now be happy with things, and the word is that China’s and Russia’s competition bodies are now looking it all over. Of most interest for those of us in the Java world will be the 5 hour (!) webcast being given this week by Oracle. Presumably during that time they will cover in more detail their intentions for Java, and hopefully discuss Swing and JavaFX. The presentation is on Wednesday 27th January, 9:00am – 2:00pm Pacific time. You can register for it, and find out more, here.
Now, on with this weeks most relevant news.
Swing
JavaFX
Griffon
Well, that’s all folks. Keep up the hard work and will see you in a weeks time, when things in the Java world (post an Oracle acquisation) might be a little bit clearer!
So, my team at Sun has an opening for a guru in rich-text user interface controls. This is a big project and it’s getting a huge push. As detailed in the job spec:
This is a software staff engineering position requiring the ability to design, test, implement and maintain rich-text user interface controls. The person in this role is expected to identify areas for improvement and modification of Sun’s platform products and contribute to Sun’s overall product strategy. This person will work closely with others within the team and across teams to accomplish project objectives. May assume a leadership role in projects, including such activities as leading projects, participator in product planning and technology evaluation and related activities. May use technical leadership and influence to negotiate product design features or applications, both internally, and with open source groups as needed.
We really want to get this position filled now, so if you are keen, or know someone that is keen – apply! Working in the JavaFX team, and of course in particular the team I’m in, is a great deal of fun, and you get to work with people who really are smart and enthused about what they’re doing. You’ll learn a lot, and get to really sink your teeth into a growing technology and platform. Of course, the thrill of seeing your code used around the world is a pretty cool thing too.
So, if you have what we need, apply today, and I look forward to working with you!
Well, like I said last week, the gears are very quickly getting moving again after the new years break – there is a tonne of news out this week, and a lot of good indepth posts for you guys to sink your teeth into. Also, it finally seems like my pleas to be notified of interesting Java desktop posts has been heard, as I received a number of emails this week which I’ve included below. Thanks everyone!
Swing
JavaFX
- 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.
- With the second Silicon Valley JavaFX presentation by Amy Fowler now behind us, we have the third one coming up in only a few weeks: it’s Hinkmond Wong who will be giving detailed talk on the state of the art in the mobile landscape. If you are interested in mobile development, this event will give you the answers.
- 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 Morris using it for some demos as well.
- Eric Warriner has created a mashup using the National Public Radio and Google Maps APIs (and 125 lines of JavaFX code) to translate a given zip code to show all available NPR stations.
- Mitchell Pronschinske has a short interview with Lukas Hasik regarding the Netbeans Composer plugin for designing JavaFX user interfaces visually.
- Max Katz, on the Exadel blog, has announced that version 1.2 of the Exadel JavaFX plugin for Eclipse has been released.
- Tom Eugelink has posted a comprehensive post discussing developing JavaFX code using Eclipse.
- 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.
Miscellaneous
- Kirill Grouchnikov has rounded our his series on animation by posting the big picture, and some footnotes.
That’s the links for the past week. I hope the were edutaining. Catch you all next week, and keep up the great work!
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