Jim Weaver’s Rich-Client Java Blog

Achieving mutual symbiosis between Web pages and JavaFX apps

Image: Leonard Low, Creative Commons.

As illustrated in the movie Finding Nemo, clownfish and sea anemones have a mutual symbiotic relationship.  The latter Wikipedia article states that "The territorial [clown] fish protects the anemone from anemone-eating fish, and in turn the stinging tentacles of the anemone protect the clownfish from its predators. A special mucus on the clownfish protects it from the stinging tentacles". Of course, as also demonstrated in Nemo, mutualism breaks down when uninvited barracudas join the party ;-)

Two of the creatures in the internet application ecosystem are web pages/apps, and rich internet apps created in platforms such as JavaFX and Flex.  I like the way that Stephen Chin characterizes these creatures when he was interviewed by James Sugrue for the DZone article entitled JavaFX in Practice:

"My prediction is that this will be the year that the RIA movement will help reclaim developer sanity. Forcing all web applications to run inside the limitations of browser scripting languages was a tremendous setback to the modern computing era and sanity of developers across the world.  I have a lot of respect for the intellectual work that has gone into modern AJAX implementations and Javascript code generation libraries, but reproducing decade-old UI paradigms in the browser is not going to advance the computer science field.  JavaFX has the potential to unleash the creativity of everyday developers by providing a platform that is limitless in possibilities."

I wholeheartedly agree with Stephen, and feel that it is very important when creating a new application to not just assume that its UI should live in a web browser.  We need to carefully consider which portions of its functionality (if any) belong inside a web browser, and which portions would offer the user a better experience outside of the browser.  It is my opinion that desktop applications should follow the lead of apps on mobile devices such as Android and iPhone, declaring that "there's an app for that", rather than "there's a browser-based throwback to 1970s mainframe CICS screens for that" :-)

Of course, web browsers will continue to play a critical role in internet applications, and are particularly suited in areas for which they were originally created, namely sharing current, hyper-linked, information in various media types.  For example, the Help facilities of many installed applications (e.g. Adobe Photoshop and iTunes) are either entirely composed of web pages, or link to web pages for several of their help topics).  Conversely, the Charts tab of the iTunes web site invokes the installed version of iTunes and navigates to a given item in the iTunes store when the user clicks on a song in the web page.

One of the great features of the Web, browsers, and search engines, is the ability to find/bookmark web pages and other content by a URL.  To leverage this, I've been experimenting with the idea of having a landing/launch page for JavaFX apps that are invoked via Java Web Start or in a WidgetFX dock.  This enables these apps to have a page that can be cataloged/ranked by search engines, and gives the user a way to find/bookmark the JavaFX app.  While implementing this idea, I followed the lead of bit.ly and identified a short domain name that would be conducive to tweeting JavaFX app links without requiring URL shortening.  The domain name that I'm using is jfx.me, and I've developed a couple of example landing/launch pages whose URLs are easy to remember and type:

• jfx.me/speedreaderfx.html (An application that aggregates news and social network sources)
• jfx.me/radiofx.html (Yannick Van Godtsenhoven's excellent RadioFX widget)

Currently these pages are within the context of the JavaFXpert blog, but if there is JavaFX community interest, I'll forward the jfx.me domain to a site dedicated to this purpose.  By the way, you'll notice if you visit either of the landing pages above that both Yannick and I intend to offer these apps (at no charge) in the Java Store.

Anyway, I'm very interested in your thoughts surrounding web page and RIA mutualism, so please leave a comment with your ideas.

Regards,

Jim Weaver

Win atom and bit-based Pro JavaFX books at Øredev 2009 RIA session Fri 3:35pm CET

Readers of this blog know that I like to hold contests to make things fun and encourage participation (e.g. see the 2000 USD JavaFXpert RIA Exemplar Challenge that ends 10 January, 2010).  In keeping with that sentiment, some JavaFX questions relevant to my presentation will be tweeted by @projavafxcourse to the twitterverse during the Øredev 2009 RIA Enterprise Application Developing with JavaFX session.

The seven people that earn the highest scores by tweeting fast, correct, answers to these questions will each win a copy of the Pro JavaFX book.  Six of these books will be composed of bits (e-books), and one will be composed of atoms.  The atom-based book is reserved for the person with the highest score of those present in the audience, but the e-books will be awarded (via an emailed Apress coupon) to the winners regardless on their location during the session.  This session starts on Friday,  November 6 at 3:35pm CET, lasting until 4:25pm, so please have your Twitter client ready.  When you tweet an answer, be sure to reply to the original tweet with your answer. 

On a technical note, all correct answers consist of one word or character, and the software that checks for a correct answer trims the spaces from the end of the reply and then uses the string found between the final space and the end of the reply.  So, if you want to put other words in your reply, presumably to give your followers a clue about what your terse message is, just make sure that your answer is at the end of your response.  For example, you might reply to the question:

The name of the layout class that arranges UI nodes horizontally is ____

with this message:

Answering a JavaFXpert presentation question with HBox

If you want to use an application that I'm developing for the purpose of responding to these questions, please make sure that you have a recent version (update 14 or later) of Java SE 6 and click the LearnFX icon over on the left. 

When the application starts up, the most recent question is displayed as shown in the screenshot below.  If the question is still active (i.e. the answer has not been revealed), then the text box will be enabled, allowing you to enter an answer and click the Send button or press the Enter key.  Responses that have been received appear as well, along with the the Twitter profile image, screen name, and indication of whether the question is correct (if the answer has been revealed -- if not, a question mark will be displayed).

  

The first time that you run the application, you'll need to click the configuration icon to open the configuration dialog shown below, in which you can enter your Twitter screen name and password, as well as some preferences.  This information is stored on your local machine, and automatically loaded on subsequent invocations of the application.

Until the contest begins, there is a sample question available if you wish to give this application a try before the real questions begin appearing.  By the way, when you use the LearnFX client, your tweet is a reply to the projavafxcourse user, and the message contains the following with the question ID, and answer that you supply, added to the end:

@projavafxcourse Answering JavaFXpert question http://bit.ly/2dn1kK

The bit.ly link in the message may be clicked by your followers to see what your strange tweet is about :-)

There is a WidgetFX version of this application in the works that I'll release and blog about in a subsequent post.  By the way, I'd like to publicly thank Steven Herod for the Twitter API this application uses, which he donated to the open source JFXtras project.

Regards, and good luck!  Please leave a comment if you have any questions,

Jim Weaver

You had me at Least Common Multiple :-)

One of the student winners of the the JavaFX Coding Challenge is Kazuki Hamasaki, who created the CalcFX program.  CalcFX is a deceptively functional (and incredibly useful) calculator, and is now one of the Java Web Start shortcuts on my desktop.

Kazuki: If you're reading this, please create a desktop icon for CalcFX so that it doesn't blend in with the usual coffee-cup icons deposited by Java Web Start.  For those wondering, just put the following line subordinate to the information element of the JNLP file:

<icon href="some_icon.png" width="64" height="64"/>

Congrats, and nice work, Kazuki!

Jim Weaver

The End is Near (for the September '09 JFXStudio Coding Challenge)

If you've hung around senior [-citizen] programmers (or are one), you've no doubt heard tales such as "we only had 4K of memory, and had to make use of every byte/bit".  For your amusement and edification, here's a picture from thegreatgeekmanual.com of the first Apple II (circa 1977), which sported 4K of RAM:

Josh Marinacci's latest JavaFX Studio Challenge is a bit reminiscent of these good old days, in that he is encouraging us to create a cool JavaFX program that "must not be more than 30 lines of code or 3000 characters (your choice)".

The deadline for submitting your entry for this JFXStudio Challenge is midnight Wednesday night (30 September 2009). The challenge is to create something cool in only 30 lines of JavaFX Script code, using the theme of 'Time'. To give you some ideas Josh has posted his own entry. Take a look for some inspiration!

Speaking of contests, the winners of the WidgetFX Developers Contest were announced yesterday, and I'd like to convey my congratulations to Pär Dahlberg (ScreenshotFX widget), Yannick Van Godtsenhoven (RadioFX widget), and Larry Dickson (Weather widget).  A screenshot of these widgets in the WidgetFX dock is shown on the right. I'm using the RadioFX widget as I'm writing this to listen to an internet music channel that plays baroque music.

Regards, and congratulations again to these winners!

Jim Weaver

Captured Live at the [SD]Forum: The JFXtras and WidgetFX Tour!

Prolific reviewer highway_star had this to say about the Three Dog Night Captured Live at the Forum album (paraphrased a bit).

"Three Dog Night was one of the seventies' most popular groups. Even though most of their songs were composed by other songwriters (Paul Williams, Hoyt Axton, Randy Newman and Nilsson to name a few), the combination of three excellent lead singers and a fantastic backup band ensured that they had more hits than most bands. This concert recorded on September 12th, 1969 at The Forum in Los Angeles, is one of the best concerts this reviewer has ever heard."

As an aside, I was surprised to find out that Randy Newman wrote the Three Dog Night hit song entitled "Mama Told Me Not to Come" :-O

At any rate, if you missed Three Dog Night live at the Forum, as a consolation I can highly recommend the JFXtras and WidgetFX presentation captured live at the SDForum. 

If you want to keep up on the latest additions to these JavaFX open source projects, then watch the video of this presentation in which Stephen Chin and Keith Combs skillfully walk you through the very cool and useful features!

Regards,
Jim Weaver

I Wish... Henry Zhang would make a WidgetFX widget from his JavaFX Pac-Man game

Update 24 May, 2009: Stephen Chin raises the stakes with the following comment:

"That is a quite a challenge Jim laid on you, Henry. I will up the ante with a promise to display your widget on the big stage as part of the WidgetFX JavaOne presentation if you get it done in time.  There is a good tutorial on how to build widgets from my blog.

Update 25 May, 2009: Henry Zhang picks up the gauntlet with the following comment:

"I think it is a creative idea to put a game as a widget. I will take on the challenge and hopefully the widget can be demonstrated in JavaOne. Only a week or so to go. Will let you know the progress by blogging here:
http://www.javafxgame.com"

Update 26 May, 2009:

Henry finishes the Pac-Man widget.  Check it out at javafxgame.com.  Also, just a friendly reminder to reserve the JavaOne Pro JavaFX™ Platform: RIA Enterprise Application Development with JavaFX Technology session that Stephen Chin and I will be presenting.  As of May 29, 2009 there are only 96 seats available.

Dear Henry Zhang,

Please attend Stephen Chin and Josh Marinacci's Getting Started with WidgetFX session at JavaOne (or watch the video stream), and tweak your JavaFX Pac-Man game to run as a WidgetFX widget.  It would be cool to drag Pac-Man from the WidgetFX dock and devour dots for stress relief :-)

P.S. Congratulations on article #2 in your five part Pac-Man series being published on InsideRIA.  It was a pleasure to help (albeit in small ways) with that series.

Regards,
Jim Weaver

JavaFX Mobile Coming in February 2009: A Report from the Sun M3DD Conference

Geeky note: Last year this conference was known as MEDD (Mobile and Embedded Developer Days).  When I saw that it is called M3DD this year, I thought someone was getting cute with l33t, especially given that most texting is done on mobile devices :-)  Turns out, this stands for Mobile, Media and eMbedded Developer Days.

Stephen Chin, co-author of the upcoming Pro JavaFX book, attended the M3DD conference in part to do research on JavaFX Mobile for the book.  Take a look at his blog post, which corroborates that the JavaFX 1.1 release due in February 2009 will include JavaFX Mobile.

Also, be sure to check out Stephen's recent interview with InfoQ that has good information about WidgetFX and JFXtras, two open source JavaFX projects.

Thanks,
Jim Weaver
JavaFXpert.com

Create Widgets in JavaFX with Newly-Released WidgetFX 1.0

WidgetFX is an open-source desktop widget platform written from the ground up in the JavaFX Script language. It can run widgets written in JavaFX Script and Java and takes advantage of the latest features of the Java Platform.

The 1.0 release has been updated to work with JavaFX 1.0, and has many enhancements including:

• Dock and Widget Skinning Support
• New Dock Theme
• Embedded Flash/Flex Widgets
• SlideShow Scaling Improvements
• Performance Enhancements and Many Bugfixes!

Check out the announcement from Stephen Chin and Keith Combs, and begin using and creating widgets in JavaFX today!

By the way, I've started a new category in this blog named WidgetFX in which I'll show you how to create your own widgets.  I'll start with the Audio Configuration example that you see on the left, taken from the More Cowbell post.  Then we'll turn the rotating presentation cube from a previous post into a widget.  In both cases, the widgets are operational when in the dock, and can be dragged onto the desktop where they assume their normal size.

If you'd like to launch the Audio Configuration example and the WidgetFX dock with some sample widgets, then click the following WidgetFX Launch icon.

Congratulations on this milestone, Stephen and Keith!
Jim Weaver
JavaFXpert.com