Jonathan Giles

Java desktop links of the week, August 9

Published on August 9, 2010 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

A very quiet week this week in terms of link quantity, but with new JavaFX and NetBeans releases it is made up for with some very important links to take note of this week. As always thanks to the people who take the time to email me their links.

Swing

Kas Thomas has posted about implementing smart blur in Java.
Jan Haderka has blogged that SwingX may be going to Maven. You can see further discussion of this over in the SwingX forum.
Richard Kennard recently released Metawidget v0.99, and has written a 9 part blog series on the different ways he’s encountered that people like to order their UI fields. The general conclusion is that there is no ‘right’ way and a good UI generator must support multiple ways.

JavaFX

JavaFX 1.3.1 was released this week. It contains a lot of improvements and bug fixes, and is accompanied by an updated NetBeans release. The main feature of JavaFX 1.3.1 is an improved (and more configurable) startup experience.
Danny Coward presented at Jazoon in June with an interesting talk titled ‘Java SE and JavaFX: The Road Ahead‘. It’s a good and informative talk, so if you’ve got an hour to spare the video is well worth watching.
David Kaspar has written an article over at the NetBeans knowledge base about using NetBeans JavaFX Composer fragments to make building user interfaces easier (by spanning them over multiple files).
I posted two screencasts for two controls I built in my spare time: TitledPane and Accordion.

Kas Thomas

UI Oddities #2 – NetBeans

Published on August 5, 2010 in User Interface. 1 Comment Tags: oddities, ui.

Todays UI oddity is small, but important, and it’s something that has irked me ever since I started using NetBeans (when I joined the JavaFX team last year). Despite me picking on NetBeans here, this problem is common in many applications, and largely goes ignored or unnoticed by developers. I wanted to point it out as it is a very easy UI crime to commit, and one that can sometimes take a lot of effort to fix. Fortunately, in the cases below it would be trivial to fix.

In NetBeans you often get dialog windows like the one shown below. The problem is simply that the header area has a 1 pixel wide gray border around all four edges. This looks nice to delineate between the white of the header and the light gray of the main content area, but it looks really bad on the north, east and west sides of the header. Fortunately this is easily fixed.

To back up my point, look at the screenshot below, which is again NetBeans, but a different dialog without the additional border on the north, east and west sides of the header. In my opinion it looks considerably cleaner:

The only negative aspect is that the two border colours differ between the top dialog and the bottom dialog, but this again is an easy fix and just a matter of defining the default colour for header borders.

Finally, I wanted to point out another common example of bad borders, and was fortunate enough to find the following screen in my NetBeans install:

This screenshot nicely shows the problem of nested borders. Look at the centre ‘Expanded Text’ tab. Inside this tabbed area is a rich text editor with its own border, but it is also wrapped within the border of the tabbed area. This looks untidy and cluttered. It’s also worth nothing that the space between the inner and outer borders differs on each side. In my opinion the inner border (the rich text editor border) should be removed in this circumstance. It would lead to a visually less cluttered and cleaner dialog in a small way.

So, in summary, be careful of borders in your software. It’s very easy to put components together and not really notice that borders are being duplicated like this. Finally, even though this is a NetBeans UI Oddity, it’s very common all across the software world, so I’m not picking on NetBeans here

Fortunately, this is an easy fix in this specific case.

Java desktop links of the week, August 2

Published on August 2, 2010 in Java and JavaFX. 0 Comments Tags: javafx.

Howdy folks. This week there wasn’t a lot of news in the Java desktop world, especially to do with Swing. There were a number of good JavaFX posts, which I’ve included here, and also a Apache Pivot discussion. Enjoy!

JavaFX

Srikanth Shenoy has released FxObjects 0.1. FxObjects is a open source Enterprise JavaFX Application Development framework. The whole intention of the framework is to make Enterprise JavaFX application development easy, elegant and fast. There is a quick summary, and also a 50-page user guide PDF.
Stuart Marks has blogged about ‘Missing Listeners and Local Overrides‘ in the JavaFX UI controls.
Speaking of control listeners, Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged his event handling proposal.
Patrick Champion has blogged about a RESTful client in JavaFX.
One of the new features in the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse is support for ‘Organize Imports‘.
Mark Anro Silva posted his JavaFX animation demo.
I posted two screencasts related to my personal SplitView project. At this point it’s a very early proof of concept only.

Apache Pivot

The Apache Software Foundation asks “Have you met Apache Pivot?“. There is also further discussion over at DZone.

That’s all for this week – I told you it was a quick post. Catch you in a weeks time.

Java desktop links of the week, July 26

Published on July 26, 2010 in Java, JavaFX and Swing Links. 0 Comments Tags: griffon, java desktop, javafx, swing.

Another week, another bunch of good links right across the Java desktop ecosystem. Let’s dive right into the links of the week!

Swing

Kirill Grouchnikov has posted release candidates of Trident, Flamingo and Substance. The final releases for all the projects are scheduled for August 9. Only bugs will be fixed until that date.
Gerrit Grunwald has posted about painting conical gradients in Java2D.

JavaFX

I posted an example of how to create a ListView in JavaFX that supports multiple selection over at FX Experience.
dooApp posted an introduction to their FXForm project. FXForm is a library providing automatic form generation for JavaFX objects.
Carl Dea has published a JavaFX Tabbed Pane and Tab Panel prototype.
Sébastien Stormacq has posted about creating an animated chart in JavaFX.
Srikanth Shenoy continues with the third part of his series titled ‘Effective JavaFX Architecture’. This week his post looks at ‘Asynchronous calls, Command Pattern and Testability‘.
As part of his series of posts, Srikanth has also been creating a JavaFX project called fxobjects. From the website, “FxObjects is a JavaFX Application Framework that enables methodical, pattern based and test friendly way of developing JavaFX applications based on ideas and best practices distilled from real life usage”.
Due to the amount of echoing going on about JavaFX and it’s future, most of which consist of references to each other (with very little further information), I’ve picked out Max Katz’s post this week as the only one I’m including. His post discusses what he believes the future of JavaFX looks like, both the good and the bad points.

Griffon

Andres Almiray announced the release of Griffon 0.9.
Andres Almiray was recently interviewed by DZone about Griffon 0.9, the road behind and the road ahead.
The Griffon Guide 0.9 Reference Documentation has been posted, which is a work-in-progress.

So, in general, a week of impressive links, with some new releases, and interesting discussions and demonstrations. Keep it up folks, and I’ll catch you all again in a weeks time.

Sébastien Stormacq

Java desktop links of the week, July 19

Published on July 19, 2010 in Java, JavaFX and Swing Links. 0 Comments Tags: griffon, java desktop, javafx, swing.

Well, what an interesting week we had in the JavaFX world. It started off with Kirill Grouchnikov posting his thoughts that JavaFX is a train wreck. This created a number of threads around the web discussing this. At the same time Stephen Chin posted his petition to open source JavaFX. So much controversy, so many (sometimes anonymous) comments – what a week! For what it’s worth, I’m just reporting the news here, not endorsing or disagreeing with any of it

Swing

Kirill Grouchnikov has blogged about dynamic resizing of ribbon components in Flamingo 5.0. He also showed off the latest Mariner skin, which is included as part of Substance 6.1. Finally, he showed off the release information documentation for Flamingo 5.0.
Karl Schaefer has blogged about PromptSupport, which is a new feature in SwingX 1.6.1. PromptSupport relates to showing prompt text in JTextFields to inform the user of what should be typed in.
The PgsLookAndFeel is 1.1 Update 1 was released on 18th July. It fixes all known bugs.

JavaFX

As mentioned, this week Kirill Grouchnikov outlined his thinking that JavaFX is a train wreck. Quite quickly the comments on his blog became incredibly side-tracked, so he turned off comments. Because of the nature of the topic, the discussion spilled over into a number of other blogs, and for the most part was mostly negative.
Stephen Chin has posted a petition to open source JavaFX. Further discussion is available here and here.
The next Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group topic has been announced: it’ll be Stephen Chin and Keith Combs doing a live lab session where they will demonstrate the concepts behind implementing JavaFX Controls. It’s coming up August 11, so a few weeks away yet.
Jim Weaver has posted a tutorial on the Sun Developer Network titled “Stylin’ with JavaFX“.
Dean Iverson has posted some comments about his previous blog posts to fix up mistakes and misunderstandings on his part.
Max Katz has done a bunch of blogs recently, titled ‘Binding to server-side context variable from JavaFX‘, ‘Using Expression Language (EL) in JavaFX to communicate with server‘ and ‘Seam conversations from JavaFX‘.
Alex Ruiz has announced FEST JavaFX Compiler Maven Plug-in 1.0b2. This release adds new configuration options.
Sergey Malenkov has posted about ‘localized reaction time‘. It shows how you can localise your application in JavaFX.
William Antônio Siqueira has created LyricSearchFX, which you can run over at his new blog.
I posted two brief screencasts to show off a TabView control I’m building in my spare time.

Griffon

Andres Almiray has posted another Griffon 0.9 sneak peek, this time looking at runtime enhancements.

Whew! What a week. Catch you all again in a week.

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Jonathan Giles

Java desktop links of the week, August 9

Swing

JavaFX

UI Oddities #2 – NetBeans

Java desktop links of the week, August 2

JavaFX

Apache Pivot

Java desktop links of the week, July 26

Swing

JavaFX

Griffon

Java desktop links of the week, July 19

Swing

JavaFX

Griffon

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