A heap of news this week, so I have kept my commentary to a minimum. Let’s get right into it.
Swing
JavaFX
- Richard Bair posted about UI virtualization in JavaFX. This relates to improving JavaFX controls performance by only creating enough nodes in scrollable areas to show the visible nodes. When the user scrolls, these nodes will be reused. This means that regardless of the actual number of items in the scrollable region, the number of nodes being created is constrained to the items in the visible area only.
- At the JVM language summit, Robert Field and Brian Goetz presented on the subject of ‘A Performance Tale: The evolution of binding in JavaFX‘. Well worth the read if you want to know the internal implementation details of binding in a little more depth.
- As I mentioned last week, there was a Sun webinar on building JavaFX applications by Jacob Lehrbaum. Well, now that the webinar has happened, you can listen to it at your own convenience.
- Stephen Chin has announced the winners of the WidgetFX contest, with the three winning projects showing an impressive amount of quality.
- The deadline for submitting your entry for this months JFXStudio Challenge is midnight Wednesday night. The challenge is to create something cool in only 30 lines of JavaFX Script code, using the theme of ‘Time’. To give you some ideas JFXStudio editor, Josh Marinacci, has posted his own entry. Take a look for some inspiration.
- Sun has published three videos discussing how to get your JavaFX applications into the Java Warehouse, which is the backend for the Java Store.
- Simon Morris has posted a beta version of his ‘crazy caption‘ application, which is a JavaFX applet that allows for you to add captions to images. The images are stored on flickr, the captions on twitter, and it shortens URL’s using bit.ly.
- Carsten Oland has blogged about how he used JavaFX classes directly from Java. I would recommend to most people to just stick to using JavaFX Script to interact with JavaFX classes, given the readability of his example.
- Johan Vos has blogged about using the GPS data coming from his cellphone in a JavaFX mobile application.
- Jim Weaver has updated his SpeedReaderFX application to use a ‘picker’ control developed within the JFXtras project.
- Alexandr Scherbatiy has posted a small code snippet showing how to bind Slider and TextBox controls together so that they can be used as a NumberBox control.
- Burk Hufnagel has posted a review of Essential JavaFX, which was released at JavaOne.
Apache Pivot
That’s us for another week – keep out of trouble everyone and I’ll see you again next week 
A quiet week this week, so this post is short and sweet. Remember, feel free to email me or message me on twitter with any links that you may have.
Swing
JavaFX
That’s it! I told you it was a quiet week Have a good week everyone, and I’ll be back in a weeks time.
It’s another week, so of course it’s time for another weeks worth of links. It’s been a very busy news week, so I have tried to keep each point succinct. Also, thanks to everyone emailing me their links. Righty – on with the news.
Swing
JavaFX
- Amy Fowler has a really useful article further clarifying layouts in JavaFX 1.2. If you’re using JavaFX, it’s well recommended that you check out this blog post.
- Speaking of layouts, Inyoung Cho has a post that provides a JavaFX applet that demonstrates the various layouts available.
- For those of you in better timezones than I, there is a Sun webinar titled “Serving the Next Billion, JavaFX: Rich Internet Experiences“. It is on September 23, 2009 at 8:00am PDT. It is being presented by Jacob Lehrbaum, Marketing Lead, and JavaFX Engineering leader.
- Josh Marinacci has posted the theme for the next JFXStudio Challenge, and it’s ‘time’. This challenge requires you to write an application in 30 lines (or 3000 characters – it’s your choice), with an Amazon gift card for the best entrant.
- Simon Brocklehurst has published the results of his applet start-up test he run last week. He has succinctly summarised where he considers the problems to be, and it’s well worth a read for anyone considering deploying on the web.
- Osvaldo Pinali has a blog discussing the new JavaFX 1.2.1 release. If you want to know what has changed, this is perhaps the best blog post I’ve seen discussing it.
- Jeff Frieson has a long tutorial on InformIT titled “Using Transitions to Simplify JavaFX Animations“.
- Jim Weaver has released SpeedReaderFX, which is an application that pulls together RSS and Atom feeds, as well as data from some social networking APIs such as Twitter (among many others). It (ab)uses my JavaFX menubar API also
- Kerry Wilson has a good tutorial on building a sticky notes application in JavaFX. This covers wrapping Swing components, using the Storage API, demonstrates simple binding and graphics/effects.
- Dmitry Kostovarov has a post discussing how to use custom fonts in JavaFX.
- Pedro Duque Vieira emailed me to remind everyone that JXScene in the JFXtras project is available and updated to work with JavaFX 1.2 and 1.2.1. JXScene allows for you to embed JavaFX scenes into your Swing applications.
Griffon
See you all again next week.
Inyoung Cho
Wow, we’re already a week into September. The year seems to be flying by, and fortunately for the southern hemisphere readers out there, it’s starting to get into nicer weather. My garden is becoming more colourful, and I’m spending more time out there than in my office on the weekends. Bring on Summer (and apologies to all northern hemisphere folk)
There is a heap of news this week, and a lot of it is quite interesting and worth reading. Let’s get into it.
General
Swing
- For anyone not following the Swing Application Framework (SAF) mailing list, after Alex Potochkin posted that the SAF will not make it into JDK 7, people started talking about forking it to continue its development. At present there are at least two forks (SAFF and BSAF). If you allow me to jump on my soapbox for a second, this frustrates me to no end. We went from the original SAF project whose requests for help fell on deaf ears (although admittedly there was not much visibly happening on Sun’s side either) to two actives forks. If we had offered our time back when it was still JSR-296 we could have had this integrated into JDK 7, but because we waited for it to effectively die, we now have to most probably wait until JDK 8, if ever, before an app framework for Swing can be integrated into a Java release. However, right now I hope very soon everyone can get behind one fork, as there is no point having multiple frameworks with almost precisely the same goals and approach. </soapbox>
- Ken Orr has posted an update to his Mac Widgets for Java so that the components look more integrated in Snow Leopard.
- Rémy Rakic has posted the second part in his series on hardware accelerating Java2D/Swing/JavaFX. This post covers pixel shaders in particular.
- Alex Ruiz has blogged that FEST-Swing 1.2a3 has just been released. FEST-Swing is a Java library that provides a fluent interface for functional Swing GUI testing. This library provides an easy-to-use API that makes creation and maintenance of GUI tests easy.
- I received an email in the week regarding Mindsilver GUIDE, which is a commercial (yet still in beta) Java GUI builder application. For now they are looking for feedback so please give it a whirl if you are so inclined, and let them know of any issues.
JavaFX
Griffon
That’s things for another week. Keep up the good work and I’ll see you again soon
