Another week, and unsurprisingly I have another bunch of links for you folks. Thanks to everyone for blogging your thoughts and what you’re working on – it’s great to hear what everyone is thinking of and doing. As always, feel free to ping me with any links you may have that you think are worth including.
Now – on with the news!
Swing
- Kirill Grouchnikov has put up a new dev release of Flamingo 5.0. This release is a relatively minor release, but important as it contains a lot of refactoring. Kirill would love it if you could download this and test it against your software to catch any showstoppers.
- Speaking of Flamingo 5.0, Kirill has also created a color selector component.
JavaFX
Griffon
That’s all for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – I’ll catch you all again next week (or sooner if you’re on twitter) – same bat time, same bat channel.
A huge amount of Java news and links this week, certainly something for everyone, I hope. As always, I’m keen to hear from you folks with any news or links you think should be included. You can find my contact details to the right.
Swing
JavaFX
- The JavaFX documentation team have updated both the JavaFX 1.3 Migration Guide and the ‘Using Layout Containers‘ documentation.
- Rakesh Menon has posted a TableView implementation he has created. It makes use of our new Cell architecture for virtualising scrollable areas (e.g. We used it in 1.3 for ListView and TreeView). Whilst his approach is basic, it works in JavaFX 1.3 and may certainly meet your needs.
- Jan Goyvaerts posted an A* path finding implementation in JavaFX this week, which is very cool. He has included a very good writeup, as well as the source code.
- Osvaldo Doederlein has posted a JavaFX implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. In his usual style he dives deep into performance implications and how he thinks they can be worked around. A great post.
- Alex Ruiz has announced the release of version 1.0b1 of the FEST JavaFX compiler Maven plugin. This plug-in compiles JavaFX source and test files.
- Stephen Chin has announced a beta 2 release of JFXtras 0.7, which aims to get JFXtras working on JavaFX 1.3. Importantly, this release has controls ported over to JavaFX 1.3. He has also blogged about his upcoming JavaFX talks at Jazoon and JavaOne.
- Antoine Mischler has blogged about his thoughts on developing a business application using NetBeans Composer.
- The NetBeans team have put up a good article on data binding in NetBeans 6.9.
- The Exadel blog has a post covering some of the features of the JavaFX plugin for Eclipse that they develop.
- Nii Osei-Agyemang has started a new blog covering how he plans to use JavaFX for GIS. Some recent posts cover his planned GIS architecture, how he ported to JavaFX 1.3, and how he is making use of JavaFX web service APIs.
- Speaking of GIS, I came across the PiriMap JavaFX application which does a similar thing. Unfortunately, I only have a video to show.
- Daniel Ziltener has posted an example of how he used the JavaFX Storage API, and is seeking your thoughts on how to improve it.
- I put up the slide deck I used for the two-hour JavaFX introduction talk I gave recently.
Griffon
That’s that for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – it’s great fun finding and reading what you’re working on. Catch you all next week! 
As I mentioned a few times on Twitter in the last few weeks, I presented at my old university (Massey University) last week. The presentation was 2 hours long, but I still had to keep my slide deck relatively brief. I thought that perhaps the slide deck might be useful to other people, so I have decided to post it up here.
A few notes though:
- It’s in Powerpoint format. I don’t ‘do’ Mac.
- It’s in Powerpoint 2007 format.
- Ok ok! I hear the squeals of pain already, so I have created a Powerpoint 2003 format version, but I’m too scared to see what broke, so use it at your own risk.
- Don’t bother running through the slides in the editor, there’s too much clutter – you need to actually run the presentation. I went with the animation-foo approach. Prepare to be wowed.
- If the media doesn’t play around about slide 10, then you’re obliged to either manually run the .flv file, or go to YouTube to watch it before proceeding.
Given the complaints that I received immediately (What?! You Mac folk don’t like being ignored?), I have done the following:
- I have created a PDF file of the slide deck without the animations and a slightly edited layout to make most of the information visible.
- Steven Herod created a Keynote slide deck and a Quicktime video, although the quality of the presentation is less than what is shown when using Powerpoint, so use this only if you need to.
So, I hope that it helps. Enjoy (or complain verbosely in the comments section).
Standard disclaimer: Oracle hasn’t pre-approved this message. I wrote what I think I know. It may be entirely untrue. JavaFX may in fact run on top of rainbow-farting unicorns.
A slightly quieter week this week, but in fact there is a heap of very useful, well-considered posts this week. Be sure to check out the links below as there is plenty of useful information!
Swing
JavaFX
- Amy Fowler has blogged about the promotion of the ‘managed’ property from LayoutInfo to Node, and at the same time covers the implication of this move. Well worth reading if you don’t understand what managed / unmanaged nodes are.
- Tor Norbye has done a very useful blog post discussing pixel considerations in Java / JavaFX. Basically, if you’re wondering why your lines look blurred, this post explains why – and how to fix it. If you’re doing anything in JavaFX, you really should read this post.
- Rakesh Menon has shown how to use the preview TreeView control we released in 1.3. You should read this as it shows the alternative way of building a tree on-demand. It’s a very nice feature of the TreeView API.
- Peter Karich has posted a ‘matchstick graph editor‘ on JFXStudio. For others creating fun little apps, in any stage of implementation, please consider posting details about it to JFXStudio – contact me for details.
- Jim Clarke has ported Jim Weaver’s 3D demo I mentioned last week to work on a TV. You can read all about the porting (basically mapping keys to the remote control), and watch a video, on Jim Weaver’s blog.
- Johannes Schneider has posted about ‘Closing the gap between Java and JavaFX‘ by making it easier to bind between JavaFX and Java code. He says that this will eventually end up in the JFXtras project.
- Sten Anderson has released Music Explorer FX 2.0, which has significant improvements over earlier releases.
- I came across the ‘getting started with the JavaFX Composer‘ tutorial this week, and whilst I don’t know it’s age, I thought it might be useful for people wanting to play with this JavaFX RAD plugin for NetBeans.
That’s us for another week. Thanks to everyone for writing these useful posts, and as always please contact me if you think I missed something or should include a link next week. Keep up the hard work folks!
Johannes Schneider
An absolute tonne of posts this week, particularly in the JavaFX world. It’s great to see that desktop Java is doing well, and that people are so active in improving, growing and supporting the community. Keep it up folks
Swing
- Kirill Grouchnikov has posted about the improved keyboard shortcut support in Substance 6.1. This is an important area and I suggest you read this post, even if just to become more aware of the problem space. Coincedently, we did something very similar to this in JavaFX 1.3 and hopefully in the future we’ll document our approach to solving this problem.
- Nick D’Arcy has continued his Scala Swing post that I mentioned last week by showing you how to select a ComboBox item programmatically and also listen to changes to the ComboBox.
- Metawidget v0.95 was released recently. Metawidget is a ‘smart User Interface widget’ that populates itself, at runtime, with UI components to match the properties of your business objects.
JavaFX
Griffon
- 10 people from the Griffon community recently got together to work on some new Griffon plugins. Out of the get-together they created three new plugins, with a fourth on the way. Check out the summary post by Andres Almiray to learn more.
I warned you that this was a busy week! I hope that there was something helpful in the bunch of links above that was of particular help and/or interest to you. If I missed something out, or you just want to complain/sing my praises, please either message me on twitter (@JonathanGiles) or email me.
Right, that’s it for another week. Keep up the hard work folks and I’ll see you all again in a weeks time.
