The folks at lodgON in Belgium have created a JavaFX application named iParticipate that enables companies and organizations to interact with dedicated focus groups in a controlled environment.
The screen shot above shows a portion of the application, which leverages JavaFX in its user interface and J2EE 6 technologies running in a Glassfish server. For more info on this application, see the related blog post by JavaFX developer Johan Vos.
Regards,
Jim Weaver
Java Champion, JavaOne Rock Star, and all-around good guy Stephen Chin is going to teach JavaFX and give away stuff at Devoxx 2009 in Antwerp, Belgium.
He'll first teach a university session to get you up to speed on the JavaFX platform, and later in the week will show you how to build Rich Internet Applications for the enterprise.
Leading up to both these sessions Stephen will post a question via the LearnFX application (see this blog post for more info on LearnFX). To win a prize, all you have to do is:
To run the LearnFX application, make sure that you have a recent version (update 14 or later) of Java SE 6, and simply click on the blue brain LearnFX icon in the Devoxx logo at the top of this post. Please don't tell Stephan Janssen (the Devoxx conference organizer) that I desecrated his logo. :-)
Break a leg, Stephen!
P.S. Last year I posted the Whack-a-Janssen game in honor of the great job that Stephen Janssen does (with the awesome help of Valérie Hillewaere and Kristien Leyn) in organizing Devoxx.
Take a whack at this now-retro game!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
In the JavaFXpert RIA Exemplar Challenge announcement, I stated that the graphic design judge would be chosen and disclosed soon. I am pleased to say that there will actually be two very high-caliber graphic design judges for this contest: Jasper Potts and Romain Guy. As if these guys needed an introduction:
Jasper Potts is a developer on the JavaFX & Swing teams at Sun Microsystems, and lives in Bath, UK. He is currently working on the new JavaFX UI controls and graphics frameworks, and was the bloke that created the JavaFX Charts API. Jasper, and Richard Bair, have an excellent JavaFX blog at fxexperience.com, where Jasper has already begun providing tips for the RIA Exemplar Challenge participants.
Romain Guy is the co-author of the ground-breaking Filthy Rich Clients book, and is a user interface toolkit engineer at Google on the Android project. Romain lives in San Francisco, California, and has a blog named Curious Creature that contains some stunning photographs, very recently of the Colorado River at sunset. He also has a "French, goofier version of Curious Creature" named #ProgX.
Stephen Chin, a Pro JavaFX book co-author, is going to help me judge the RIA Exemplar Challenge entries from a developer perspective. Stephen is the leader (with Keith Combs), of the WidgetFX and JFXtras projects. Stephen is very active in the leadership of the JavaFX community, having recently founded the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group, and has a JavaFX/Java blog at steveonjava.com.
All three are internationally recognized experts and speakers, and I am very pleased to have them help me judge the RIA Exemplar Challenge. Please be sure and enter the challenge!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
If you've been following this blog recently, you know that I've been developing an application in the SpeedReaderFX category that helps me quickly keep up on new happenings in world events, technology, gadgets, music, and social networks. SpeedReaderFX is located in the JFXtras open source project, and also serves as an example of using JFXtras classes with JavaFX.
One of the newest enhancements made to the SpeedReaderFX program takes advantage of the Picker control that David Armitage created in the JFXtras project. Here's a screen shot of a program in the JFXtras project that he created to demonstrate and test the Picker control varieties:
SpeedReaderFX uses the spinner-style variation of the Picker control, shown in the Thumb Wheel row of the screen shot above. This enables SpeedReaderFX users to quickly choose how many entries of a given feed-type (e.g. Yahoo News feeds), to display in the scrolling table. The screen shot below shows a portion of the SpeedReaderFX Criteria dialog in which the Pickers appear:
As noted previously in the Picker demo screen shot, the user can operate the mouse wheel, as well as the keyboard or mouse buttons, to select the desired number.
For more information about the SpeedReaderFX application, check out the first post in the SpeedReaderFX category of this blog. To run the application, click the SpeedReaderFX icon located on the left side of this paragraph.
By the way, since this dialog is getting pretty crowded, Dean Iverson is creating some UI design comps in which each feed type will have its own page. I've also received other ideas from readers that I plan to implement, and would like to express my appreciation for your continued input!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
Some of you may remember the advertisements for the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course back in the 1970s. Here's a flashback in which Steve Allen (an excellent former host of the Tonight Show), is interviewing students of this course. Gotta love those '70s hairstyles :-)
This course promised to increase reading speed and comprehension, partially (as I recall) by using the technique of scanning a page while limiting eye movement.
The ability to digest new information quickly is at least as important now as it was 20+ cranks of Moore's Law ago. RSS and Atom feeds have provided mechanisms to publish information as it becomes available, and social networking tools such as Twitter have HTTP-based APIs. Because it is time consuming to visit various sources of new information, I've begun developing a tool named SpeedReaderFX to present information obtained via RSS, Atom, and social networking APIs in one place.
Here's a screen shot of SpeedReaderFX as it is displaying new items of interest:
In the screen shot above, there are tweets from interesting people (Josh Marinacci and Dean Iverson), a picture taken by some fortunate soul viewing a beautiful Australian sunrise, a video containing stunning new pictures from the Hubble telescope, and an article about an expensive bottle of wine. These are displayed in the very impressive Table component that Stephen Chin and Keith Combs are creating for the open source JFXtras project. A future post will explain how to use the JFXtras Table component, using this SpeedReaderFX program as the example.
The popup menu shown above enables the user to hide a given feed (l8r, Dean!), or open the URL associated with an item in a browser (in this case, Dean's Twitter post). Note that because JavaFX does not yet have a popup menu, I leveraged the menu bar/menu capabilities of the JFXtras project to make this slightly odd-looking popup menu. If a popup menu isn't available in the next version of JavaFX, one will be created in the JFXtras project.
To inform SpeedReaderFX about your items of interest, choose the Feeds>Configure menu option. The Criteria dialog will appear (a portion shown below), enabling you to specify user names, tags, and blog feeds for various feed sources and social networks.
The prompts in the shorter text boxes indicate the type of information that may be typed into the box. For example, you'll separate the search tags in a Flickr text box with commas. The program has some text boxes filled in with examples, but you can overwrite them. A not-too-distant future version of this program will automatically save your criteria when exiting, and will load it again upon start-up. The SpeedReaderFX category of this blog will contain posts that point out some JavaFX code behind new functionality, as well as catching you up on some of the code used so far in this program. For example, I'll cite the JavaFX library that Rakesh Menon created to read the YouTube Data API, which I'm using in this program.
Selecting a check box causes the associated information source to be read and displayed in the table shown previously, with its items interspersed with items from other sources in reverse chronological order. Deselecting a check box removes the associated items from the table, which is the same result as the Hide this feed popup menu item discussed earlier.
When you're finished with the Criteria dialog, click the Close button in the upper right corner, or select the Feeds>Configure menu option again. By the way, the View menu has a couple of options that help you manage the application's window, given that you'll be opening up content in a browser. One menu item is the self-explanatory Always on Top, and the other one enables you to Hide the Date Published Column.
Now that you know how to use SpeedReaderFX, please give it a whirl by clicking the Web Start Launch button below. As always, please leave a comment if you have any questions or comments.
Regards,
Jim Weaver
It's great to finally be able to give you some details about a cool JavaFX project in which I've had the privilege of participating. For the last couple of months, some co-workers at Veriana and I have been helping Indaba Music create an internet-based, collaborative recording studio named Indaba Console 2.0. The alpha release was this morning (July 9, 2009) and it is written entirely in JavaFX/Java. Check out this screenshot, and a Wired article that contains a demonstration video by musician and co-founder Dan Zaccagnino.
If you were at JavaOne 2009 you may remember the JavaFX panel session on which Chris Danzig (Indaba co-founder) and I participated.
One of the main reasons that Indaba chose JavaFX/Java is that it enables recording high-quality audio directly onto the client platform. This is achieved by leveraging the capability of JavaFX to call Java methods, and Java to call JavaFX functions. One person with whom we work closely is Bjorn Roche, who created a Java-based facility and API that interacts with the audio capabilities of the client machine. The JavaFX portion of the Console provides most of the UI, and uses the Java-based API when it needs to play a track, apply audio effects, render a sound-wave, or record music. This Java library then invokes JavaFX callback functions as it is doing its work.
The UI consists of many custom components, some of which subclass CustomNode, and many which subclass Contol (when skinnable and/or highly interactive components are required). Recording session, mix, and audio data are stored "in the cloud", as they say. The application is written in JavaFX 1.1, but is being ported to JavaFX 1.2, where performance and memory usage are greatly optimized.
Congrats, and thanks to the Indaba folks! Please give the music console a whirl and unleash your musical creativity!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
As mentioned in an earlier post, Farata Systems has created a JavaFX UI for the classic Pet Store demo. For Yakov Fain's perspective on JavaFX (written in early February 2009) after developing this Pet Store UI in JavaFX, check out his article on the Farata Systems website.
Regards,
Jim Weaver
JavaFXpert.com (Learn JavaFX blog)
Several people have asked for a table of contents for the Pro JavaFX Platform early access eBook (by Weaver, Gao, Chin, and Iverson) to give them a better idea of what's inside. Because the table of contents isn't on the Apress site yet, I'm posting it here. Apress and Amazon aren't likely to post the fully expanded table of contents anyway.
I've sprinkled in a few screenshots to give you a flavor for some of the example programs:
CHAPTER 1: Getting a Jump Start in JavaFX
CHAPTER 2: Taking a Closer Look at the JavaFX Script Language
CHAPTER 3: Creating a User Interface in JavaFX
CHAPTER 4: Using Functions, Classes and Other Advanced Features
CHAPTER 5: Creating Custom UI Components in JavaFX
CHAPTER 6: Using the Media Classes
CHAPTER 7: Dynamically Laying Out Nodes in the User Interface
Chapter 8: Extending JavaFX with Third-Party Libraries
CHAPTER 9: Building a Professional JavaFX Application
Chapter 10: Developing JavaFX Mobile Applications
We end where we began, with the Hello Earthrise program, this time running in JavaFX Mobile.
Regards,
Jim Weaver
As I mentioned in the Can JavaFX be used to Develop Real-World Applications post, Yakov Fain indicated that he has started looking into JavaFX and plans to publish a couple of articles (in Java Developer's Journal) going through development of an application that real-world software developers can relate to.
Today, Yakov released an excellent article entitled Pet Store with JavaFX 1.0.- Part I which includes a quick video (6 minutes) of the Pet Store Demo UI in JavaFX. In this version, the JavaFX program is integrated with Sun's Pet Store Demo application services and database. For example, the screenshot above shows the information about one of the available cats. The screenshot below demonstrates the ability to use the wrap() function of the SwingComponent class to wrap Swing components, in this case to add data about a new pet.
Be sure to take a look at this article and video, which features Sylvester Stallone (just kidding, the screenshot below shows Yakov Fain being added as a pet and uploading his picture).
Congratulations, Yakov, and thanks for this great example of using JavaFX for the UI in an enterprise application!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
http://JavaFXpert.com (Learn JavaFX blog)
In December 2008 I featured a JavaFX application spotted "in the wild" named Sapphire, of which a more recent screenshot appears below:
According to the Sapphire User Guide, "The Sapphire classroom observation software reflects the state-of-the-art in education technology. Sapphire provides an easy-to-use interface, multiple platform deployments, and interchangeable observation forms which can be customized to fit most any situation. Cutting-edge Java technologies power Sapphire. From the embedded Derby database through custom Java libraries, all the way out to the JavaFX graphical interface, we designed Sapphire to be flexible, extensible, and deployable over a wide range of user environments. Unlike traditional rubrics, Sapphire can accurately time instructional processes to the level of seconds and efficiently categorize timing results according to myriad criteria. Its ability to incorporate the difficult issue of partial engagement relatively effortlessly is unique in the industry."
By the way, you can try out this application via Web Start by clicking either of the screenshots above. Note: The Standards Company is in the process of acquiring a code-signing certificate, but until then there will be a warning that states that the digital signature cannot be verified.
I asked Ben Jones of The Standards Company to fill us in on lessons learned as his company has been enhancing Sapphire, and he responded with the following:
"Just a few months ago we deployed the community edition of Sapphire
which you covered in a December JavaFXpert blog post. The development of
Sapphire continues. Incorporating user experiences and JavaFX community
feedback, a February update to the application included many changes. In
comparison to that initial release, the most obvious difference appears
in the user interface; however, the real changes run much deeper than
the GUI skin. The most significant of these stems from embracing JavaFX
as a real RIA technology instead of treating it as simply a graphical
markup script. This might sound like an odd statement for a data
intensive, multi-tier, production level application like Sapphire, so
let me explain in a bit more detail.
Initially when Sapphire was on the drawing board, we considered JavaFX
as a convenient way to “skin up” a GUI for the application—a type of
Swing alternative. This meant using JavaFX as a quick means to produce a
graphical veneer from which to hang the real functionality. Such a
simplistic view of JavaFX led us down a path where the mindset became
“how do I wrap my Java application?”, not “how do I create usability?”
That distinction profoundly affected our original development efforts by
fostering a jump-to-Java design.
A case in point, the original registration process found in Sapphire
relied upon a custom Java class that wrapped a DOM parser to deal with
the XML returned from a REST web service. While perfectly serviceable,
this approach failed to capitalize on the asynchronous pull parsing
available in JavaFX. The update dropped this approach in favor of using
the RemoteTextDocument with a JSON pull parser that binds directly to
the registration model. The asynchronous nature of the
RemoteTextDocument allows the user interface to remain active and
responsive to interactions while the direct parser to model binding
better supports future extensibility options.
There are numerous areas within Sapphire making the transition from
wrapped Java functionality to inherent JavaFX capabilities. While the
ability to “step-out” to Java provides tremendous wealth of potential
functionality, the real power comes from using the unique abilities of
JavaFX and blending Java back in where appropriate. From our
perspective, it has been a lesson well learned.
"
Thanks, Ben, for your insight, and congrats on the development and success of this JavaFX application!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
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