Welcome to another week of Java desktop links of the week. This week we get to see a bunch of two enterprise Swing applications built atop NetBeans RCP (which all both, in my humble opinion, need a bit of a GUI spit, polish and shine). We also (finally!) see generics being integrated into Swing in the OpenJDK. JavaFX is also gaining momentum, with the GUI Builder tool being shown off, and preview releases of JFXtras and Xenon Data Grid being the highlights.
Swing
- Finally, Florian Brunner has seen his first patch accepted into the OpenJDK. For those unaware, Florian is working on swing-generics, trying to add generics to Swing. This is essentially the start of what I once considered Swing 2.0. His first patch is to add generics to JList. Here’s hoping he continues to see more patches integrated, and hopefully without too many hurdles in the Swing-dev mailing list.
- Ken Orr posted an update on the Sea Glass look and feel that he and Kathryn Huxtable are working on.
- Jeremy has posted a very interesting Java applet that demonstrates some code he has made available for creating halftone gradients. The effect is a nice change from normal gradients, but as with all visual effects, use with care
- Geertjan Wielenga has an interview with Craig Marshall, who is involved in a NetBeans RCP project based around Enterprise Financial Management.
- If Enterprise Financial Management isn’t your scene, perhaps Satellite Environment Software is. If so, Frane Milos has posted about software written in Swing and built atop the NetBeans RCP.
- TimeFinder v4 has been released. The TimeFinder software is written in Swing and allows universities and schools to reduce and even avoid conflicts in the timetable.
JavaFX
- This week on FXExperience.com Richard Bair blogged about ‘language lessons 1: object creation‘, and ‘writing a Java-based game‘, and Jasper Potts posted a number of sample text effects that he created in JavaFX.
- Coming up in a future release of NetBeans is a JavaFX GUI builder (it’ll be available as a preview release in 6.8). This differs from the authoring tool also being developed by Sun, as the JavaFX GUI builder is intended more for developers, rather than the designers who would find more use in the authoring tool. Unfortunately, right now it doesn’t have a name – can you help? For some inspiration, screenshots can be seen here and here.
- Stephen Chin has announced a JFXtras 0.6 preview release has been made available, with a full release coming up as soon as any kinks are worked out. JFXtras 0.6 sees a number of new features, controls, and of course bug fixes. It is a great filler library should the functionality not exist in the core JavaFX release.
- Chris Wright and Jim Weaver put up a new article in their “What’s new in JavaFX 1.2 technology” series, this time covering RSS, storage and charts.
- Stephen Chin put up his Devoxx conference session slides for you to enjoy.
- Rakesh Menon expanded on his Combo Box control that he developed a few months ago by making it work on mobile devices as well.
- Johan Vos has posted part two in his series of ‘JavaFX and OSGi‘, where he introduces the OSGiFX framework.
- Lawrence Premkumar has written a sample application showing spinning text.
- Peter Pilgrim has posted milestone 4 of his Nelson Core JavaFX Framework and Xenon Data Grid control for JavaFX. As far as I can tell, that mouthful equates to a table control for JavaFX. Please, someone correct me if I’m wrong. You can play with the control yourself by loading the webstart link, and clicking on the images to start the demo.
Griffon
That’s us for another week. Enjoy the coming week, and I’ll catch you all again next week.
In a week where Devoxx happened, and closures were announced for a delayed Java 7 (now due for September 2010), there has been seemingly little news to report. This week JavaFX-related news surges ahead, which, despite it being my job, is certainly not due to any bias from me. So, if you have Swing (or any other Java desktop related) news, please fire it my way. My contact details, as always, can be found to the right, and I appreciate your emails.
Swing
JavaFX
- Special message to those in or near London on the 24th of November: Neil Bartlett is talking at Eclipse Demo Camp, where he will be showing the latest JavaFX support for Eclipse, in addition to other new Eclipse features. The talk is free, but you need to register beforehand.
- Speaking of Eclipse plugins for JavaFX, the Exadel blog has posted about ‘more new features in Exadel JavaFX‘ for Eclipse. Frankly, I’m wishing the JavaFX plugins for Eclipse all the best, as I’m so eager to return home to the comfort of Eclipse. I miss it dearly.
- With Devoxx this week, Richard Bair and Jasper Potts developed a game titled ‘Dueling Dudes’ in a few spare moments. You can read more about it (and have a play), and you can also download the source code.
- Josh Marinacci has put out a new version of his Project MaiTai project. Project Maitai, as mentioned last week, lets you visually wire up blocks to create interactive graphics.
- Stephen Chin, another speaker at Devoxx, posted his slides online for you to peruse.
- Josh Marinacci, filling the gap until official controls are released in future JavaFX releases, has offered up a ‘proportional transparent scrollbars’ control, which allows for you to scroll around a container that is larger than the viewport into it.
- Sergey Malenkov has posted his entry for the next JFXStudio coding challenge (with the theme of ‘holidays’). It is quite an interesting scrollbar/slider that slides a large image around.
- Rakesh Menon has two blog posts this week. Firstly he has blogged about creating a Picasa web viewer application in JavaFX, and secondly about text effects in JavaFX.
- The JavaFX documentation team has put up a new article on how to ‘enhance your application by applying transforms‘. This continues to clarify and (hopefully) demystify the numerous transformations that are natively supported by all JavaFX Nodes.
- Drew has a post asking for people to vote on the controls they most want to see in future releases of JavaFX. In my opinion he’s missing a whole heap of controls from his list, but then he does encourage suggestions. So get voting – I let everyone in the JavaFX controls team know about it, so I’m sure we’ll be keeping an eye on it.
- Even though the Java Store is still only available to US citizens, it is now possible for people in the UK, Australia, India, China, Sweden, Brazil and Russia to sign up to the Java Warehouse and submit their applications. This enables you to give (your software must be free for now) your software to US citizens.
Griffon
That’s another week of Java desktop links behind us. Whilst you’re here, I thought I’d mention that Java Desktop links of the week is undergoing some changes in the next few weeks, so please, leave comments about what you like and don’t like so that I can be sure to keep moving in the right direction. No feedback means you lose the right to complain
Welcome back to another week of Java desktop links. There is a heap of interesting news and articles this week, so I hope you enjoy and learn something new. On with the news!
Swing
- Rob blogs about tooltips and scrollpanes in Swing, and the problem whereby a tooltip is showing and the viewport is moved, resulting in the mouse hovering over a different tooltip-containing component. Ideally, the tooltip would be updated to the new component, but this is not the case. Rob offers a new TooltipListener class to resolve this.
- With the recent update of Jide components, one of the new features was better handling of JTables. This work was originally implemented, and blogged about, by Ken Orr.
- Speaking of Ken, he also blogged about ‘creating the iTunes navigation header‘ in Java2D.
- In another Java2D post, Jeremy blogs about creating efficient gradients.
JavaFX
- Richard Bair posted three blogs on FXExperience.com this week. They are related to looping in FX, function delegation, and seeking feedback on node lookup.
- JavaFX.com has started a new section covering JavaFX How-To’s. This looks like a great starting point for anyone wanting to get up to speed in a certain aspect of JavaFX.
- Sungmoon Cho has published results of the first JavaFX Survey have been published and analysed.
- Josh Marinacci posted the winners of the last JavaFX coding challenge, which had a 30 line (or 3000 character) constraint, and the theme of ‘five’. On the same page he announces the new coding challenge theme of ‘holiday’, which ends December 15th. Get your code on!
- Speaking of Josh, he has announced Project Maitai, which he introduces in his blog. In short, MaiTai lets you visually wire up blocks to create interactive graphics.
- News was released this week that the Java Store is now accepting payment via PayPal. Of course, this is assuming you can access the Java Store, which is presently limited to the US.
- If you’d like to learn more about the Java Store, there is a three-part Deep Dive video interview between Ed Ort and Bernard Traversat.
- Tor Norbye published his coding conventions for the JavaFX language.
- Stephen Chin is going to be offering prizes to people attending his session at Devoxx. You can find out how you can be in to win at his blog.
- Carl Dea published a review of the new ‘JavaFX in Action’ book written by Simon Morris. Speaking of this book, Simon has blogged about taking pixels to print.
- Sten Anderson has blogged about the release of Music Explorer 1.1, his award-winning JavaFX application. This version is mostly about performance and stability improvements and it’s also the first version to be released under JavaFX 1.2. Additionally, it sports a new feature: the “Fame” knob.
- Rakesh Menon has blogged about connecting a JavaFX application to the Echo Nest digital music REST API.
Catch you all again next week. Remember to keep on flicking me any links you think relevant, and have a great week!
A heap of news this week, with a resurgence of Swing links being particularly pleasing to see. Righty – on to the news!
Swing
- SwingX 1.6 was released this week, which is quite an exciting release as it does away with Java 5 backwards compatibility, which allows for the codebase to be cleaned up considerably.
- Kirill Grouchnikov is starting to need his own section these days, but for now I’ll just link to his four posts in the last week. Firstly, he announced the official release of Flamingo 4.2, which is a stabilisation release that adds a few minor features and fixes all known bugs. Secondly, he did two posts on control alignment in Substance, which is the nice attention to detail that most look and feels neglect to pay attention to. Finally, Kirill wrote a Sea Glass skin for Substance, based on the details outlined by Ken Orr and Kathryn Huxtable.
- Marina Kamahele has written an article on java.net about using ‘transparent’ panels to mix heavyweight and lightweight components.
- David Qiao, from JIDE, has announced that JIDE 2.8.0 and JIDE Charts have been released.
- Jean-Francois Poilpret let me know about the Painless-Gridbag project, which attempts to simplify the use of the Gridbag layout in Swing.
- I came across the gtkJFileChooser project this week, which aims to create a JFileChooser that looks consistent with the new file chooser offered in recent Gnome releases (i.e. 2.4+).
- I was recently informed of the PortletDock swing component, which allows you to add a bunch of non-overlapping components to it that can then be rearranged by the user by dragging with the mouse or by minimizing them.
JavaFX
That’s us for another week. Keep up the hard work, and I’ll catch you all again next week.
http://www.pushing-pixels.org/?p=1504
Another week rolls around, and who would’ve thought it would be November already?! Yeesh, this year is flying. There has been some interesting news / blog posts this week, so read on to see what has gone down in the last seven days. As always, thanks to the people for emailing me, and please keep it up if you don’t want me to miss something of importance to you. You can also catch me on twitter at @JonathanGiles.
General
- For Eclipse users who develop in Windows 7, you may be interested to see the work being done by Tasktop/Microsoft on improving Eclipse to better integrate with some of the new features in Windows 7.
- Whilst I don’t really like mentioning commercial products, I’m too nice to say no. This week I was emailed by deNova, who produce a commercial Java installer builder called JExpress. To balance things out a bit, I will also mention that IzPack is a free Java installer that I have used in the past and which works remarkably well, integrating easily into your build script.
- Similarly, XDepend is a commercial source code analyzer that “lets you extract, visualize, seek and control the structure of your applications and frameworks”. Unfortunately, now that I’m developing in JavaFX Script, I haven’t had a chance to test XDepend either, however, XDepend has a free trial if you’re interested in playing with it.
Swing
JavaFX
- The second JavaFX 30 lines / 3000 characters coding challenge, with the theme of ‘five’ is now over. Some of the entries include a Muslim prayer time display (which must occur five times a day), and a Mayan calculator.
- The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group has announced it’s first meetup, which whilst sounding like it may exclude a large chunk of people who are nowhere near Silicon Valley, they have said that they intend to stream their meetups, and their first talk will be given by Richard Bair.
- Osvaldo Pinali has blogged about programming bitmapped graphics in JavaFX. He achieved this by dropping down into Java2D, however his results are impressive. Additionally, his approach, and comments in the blog, raise a number of interesting discussion points.
- Simon Morris, author of the JavaFX in Action book, has just published part two of his “Bluffer’s Guide to JavaFX“. This part focuses entirely on Strings in JavaFX.
- Drew (whose last name will forever evade me) has posted two articles this week. Firstly, he discussed skinning in JavaFX (which should be considerably improved in SoMa), and ‘rethinking the Stage‘, which discusses issues with the lack of global keybinding in JavaFX (which I’m well aware of, being the developer behind the JavaFX Menu / MenuBar control).
- Nick Wiedenbrueck has blogged about a simple Scala console he wrote in JavaFX.
- JavaFX Mobile apps can now be built using the mobile emulator on a Mac.
- The Sun Tech Test Train game developed to test your skills in JavaFX has been updated.
Griffon
That’s all folks – keep up the hard work, and catch you next week: same bat time, same bat channel.
