Java desktop links of the week, October 24

It's another public holiday here in New Zealand today, so hopefully I churn this post out in record time. Anyway - a heap of great links this week (including a few I missed last week). Enjoy! :-)

• Gerrit Grunwald had two posts I missed last week - they are two more of his 'Friday Fun' posts. This time he has built a weather widget and a cool-looking timer control.
• Jeff Frieson has an article about read-only properties in JavaFX. The article lacks a little clarity, so I was a little reticent to include it. The biggest issue is the fact that the methods are not final (although the class is, but I worry people won't notice this). The methods not being final provides a huge issue if subclasses try to override the getter / setter methods and include logic (because then there are two code paths - setting via the setter and setting via the property method - and they do not overlap, resulting in unexpected behaviour at runtime. The standard rule applies - when creating getter / setter / property methods, always make them final.
• Michael Hoffer has released ScaledFX 0.4.
• A Kickstarter project has been started to fund a JavaFX version of the webs flexbox layout. It seems like the code (which already exists in some form) will be made available in the (currently empty) github repo should the funding be reached (otherwise presumably it will remain closed source). For those of you who didn't attend JavaOne, the development of a flexbox layout for JavaFX was something that was proposed for a future JavaFX release (JDK 9 update or, more probably, JDK 10).