A JavaFX Visual Designer Tool Just Fell out of the Sky

Jeff Martin of ReportMill Software has been involved with the JavaFX community since the beginning.  ReportMill has been working on a GUI builder tool for JavaFX named JFXBuilder, and has given the community a peek from time to time.  Each time, I've kicked the tires a bit, but haven't felt that it was ready for prime time.

Today on a JavaFX community mailing list, I received the following email from Jeff that began with:

"Hope nobody minds me posting this, since it's free and "educational". :-)

-jeff"

It was followed by the first portion of the JFXBuilder press release, which contains a Java Web Start link to JFXBuilder, and information such as the following:

"JFXBuilder is a desktop design and composition application for visually building JavaFX applications quickly, including the ability to:

• Perform drawing and illustration
• Add and edit rich text (fonts, colors, styles, wrapping, spelling, etc.)
• Apply advanced fills (textures and gradients)
• Apply advanced effects (shadow, reflection, emboss, glow, etc.)
• Apply advanced transforms (rotation, scale, skew)
• Drag and Drop images and other media
• Drag and Drop application components
• Apply Key-Frame based animation
• Apply path-based animation
• Apply Input-related behavior (Mouse-over, Mouse-down, etc.)
• Attach to a database or XML and perform data binding
• Design simple layouts for default JavaFX mobile devices
• Generate JavaFX code on the fly"

I decided to play with it a bit today, and was very impressed with its features. I'm excited about evaluating its ability to help build JavaFX applications, and would invite you to do the same.  Here's a screenshot of the tool at the point that it really started getting my attention, especially after the comment I made yesterday about desiring a library of JavaFX graphs:



As I dragged the mouse on the trackball shown above in the lower-right corner, the perspective of the 3D bar graph changed accordingly.  I was not expecting that level of sophistication, given that JavaFX SDK 1.0 was released only two weeks ago.

I haven't experimented much with JFXBuilder, and I don't know anything about their licensing-related plans yet, but wanted to give you a heads-up that this looks seriously cool to me so far.

Jeff Martin or someone from ReportMill: If you read this, would you leaving a comment and/or link about your licensing-related plans for JFXBuilder?

Regards,
Jim Weaver
JavaFXpert.com

Comments

[dental care]

the isectos are magnificent creatures and very interesting, I like reading these blogs to learn more and entertain!

[Fayaz]

i wrote the following into "test.fx" file :
I was not able to run the following in my netbeans IDE
Hope sme1 wud consider , shall be much obliged .

// Scene Definition

import com.jfxbuilder.fx.Animator;
import com.jfxbuilder.fx.AnimRecord;
import javafx.ext.swing.SwingButton;
import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.text.Font;var scene = Scene {
fill: Color.WHITE
width: 600
height: 400
content: [SwingButton {
text: "Button"
font: Font {
name: "Arial",
size: 11
}
id: "1"
translateX: 402
translateY: 229
width: 80
height: 22
}]
};

var animator = Animator {
parent: scene
records: [AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateX"
time: 0
start: 346.0
end: 268.0
len: 1040
}, AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateX"
time: 1040
start: 268.0
end: 163.0
len: 1520
}, AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateX"
time: 2560
start: 163.0
end: 243.0
len: 1160
}, AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateX"
time: 3720
start: 243.0
end: 402.0
len: 960
}, AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateY"
time: 0
start: 133.0
end: 190.0
len: 1040
}, AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateY"
time: 1040
start: 190.0
end: 125.0
len: 1520
}, AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateY"
time: 2560
start: 125.0
end: 74.0
len: 1160
}, AnimRecord {
id: "1"
attr: "translateY"
time: 3720
start: 74.0
end: 229.0
len: 960
}
]
loops: true
startImmediately: true
};

[Jeff Martin]

That package is available in our runtime jar (http://reportmill.com/jfxb1/JFXBuilderRT1.jar.pack.gz). It's currently a very small jar, and the goal is to avoid doing using any non-standard runtime. But, of course, we can easily add functionality by doing this.

Sorry for the missing docs & bugs. Unfortunately we have to wait until the market grows before we can invest substantial resources (a chicken and the egg problem, I know :-).

[Shai]

I'm playing with this and indeed its a cool tool (even if somewhat short on docs). The only major problem I have with it (besides bugs) is using its output, it seems to import the com.jfxbuilder package and a remarkable amount of googling couldn't find that package. Is it public?
If not then how can we use the tool or is usage for anything other than playing around prohibited?

Thanks.