Java desktop links of the week, March 24

Hi all. The big news this week was of course Java 8.0 being released, but that didn't seem to stop all of you from getting your projects done - there is a heap of interesting news this week! Keep up the great work, and to everyone else, enjoy! :-)

JavaFX

• As mentioned, Java 8.0 / JavaFX 8.0 was released this week. It shouldn't surprise anyone that this is a major release of JavaFX, bringing with it a heap of new features and bug fixes, having been in development for a very long time! If you haven't already, you can download JDK 8 from the usual source. Whilst that is downloading, you can learn more about what is new in JavaFX 8.0, or read the JavaFX documentation. There are heaps of features in this release, but some of my (very biased!) favourites include new controls (TreeTableView and DatePicker), UI control support on embedded platforms, print support, 3D support, bi-directional text support, and of course the new Modena stylesheet that is used by default. You can read more detail about the JavaFX features in JDK 8 in the release notes.
• Tom Eugelink has added a new 'CircularPane' layout container to the JFXtras project. His blog post is a very interesting read that covers the details of implementing such a layout (to avoid overlapping nodes, for example).
• Tomas Mikula continues to create interesting JavaFX projects! This week he has open sourced his EasyBind project, which "leverages lambdas to reduce boilerplate when creating custom bindings." Overall it looks like a very useful library for people to investigate using in their projects.
• Speaking of Tomas, he has also done a blog post titled "Trigger processing after a period of inactivity", which shows how to use ReactFX to defer processing of user input until a specified period of user's inactivity.
• Michael Berry has blogged about draggable and detachable tabs in JavaFX. This is something I've been wanting to do in JavaFX for a very long time, so I'm pleased someone has already done it :-) It would be great to see this contributed back to OpenJFX / JFXtras / ControlsFX so that it could be more widely used and tested.
• Adam Bien has announced afterburner.fx version v1.4.4. This release includes support for resource bundles and improved support for mocking.
• Dino Tsoumakis has updated followme.fx, a sample afterburner.fx project for iOS based on Adam Bien's afterburner.fx.
• Jens Deters has posted a call for people to verify the responsiveness of their applications to different screen / font size configurations, after he found one of his apps rendered poorly.
• Christoph Nahr has released MIME Browser 1.3, a JavaFX-based application for browsing MIME messages that are locally stored in standard EML files.
• Sean Phillips has a video titled "Enhancing NASA Mission Support with JavaFX 8". The video demonstrates his work with JavaFX, ControlsFX, and NetBeans. Very impressive stuff.
• Mark Stephens has a blog post with some screenshots / information about the new (and commercial) JavaFX-based PDF viewer that IDR Solutions is working on.
• Dirk Lemmermann has released a first early access build of his (commercial) JavaFX-based FlexGanttFX library.

Catch you next week :-)