Six Degrees of Bob Seger: A JavaFX Program that We'll Build Together

To acknowledge the Detroit Java Users Group for inviting me to give a JavaFX presentation, I'm starting a project that features Detroit-born musician Bob Seger.  We'll build this project in an iterative manner together, with each post adding new functionality and improving the application's appearance.  Here are a couple of screenshots of this application's humble beginnings:

The idea is that we'll eventually use the Freebase database service so that the application can show the albums on which a given musical artist contributed.  For example, as shown above, Bob Seger contributed on Little Feat's Let It Roll album, and on Aaron Neville's Warm Your Heart album.  When an album is clicked, the artists that contributed on that album are shown.  For example, when the Let It Roll album is clicked a screenshot similar to the one below would be displayed, indicating that Bonnie Raitt, Richie Hayward, Bob Seger and Linda Ronstadt contributed on that album:

In the process of traversing from artist to album to artist, I think that it will be interesting to note which artists have played on albums with other musicians.  It should also be fun to play a game similar to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in a musical context, rather than the usual movie context.

By the way, we'll be using the JSON parser that is in release 0.4 of the open source JFXtras project.  See Stephen Chin's blog post that announces and describes the features in this release.

In the next post of this Freebase Contributing Artists App series, I'll publish the code in its then current state.

Regards,

Jim Weaver
JavaFXpert.com

Comments

[Minder]

Thanks for the presentation at ePrize tonight! It was a great overview of the language/platform and its practical use cases.

[buy eve isk]

Thanks for your participation in the presentation, and I do look forward to seeing sketches/concepts for this application. It would be great if you could provide some narrative on your thought process as you do the graphics design so that this series can document the interaction between the graphics designer and developer.

[Jim Weaver]

"As for the art side of the project, in the near future I'll do some sketches/concepts and also talk to my main artist about some input."

Tony the game guy,

Thanks for your participation in the presentation, and I do look forward to seeing sketches/concepts for this application. It would be great if you could provide some narrative on your thought process as you do the graphics design so that this series can document the interaction between the graphics designer and developer.

Thanks again,
Jim Weaver

[tmack]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the presentation at ePrize tonight! It was a great overview of the language/platform and its practical use cases.

For the music project, if you need any hosting for SCM/CI/etc, let me know. We already host an open source project with a Mercurial repo: http://hg.l33tlabs.org.

As for the art side of the project, in the near future I'll do some sketches/concepts and also talk to my main artist about some input.

Regards,
Tony the game guy :)