It was my honor and privilage to lead the JavaOne 2014 Community Keynote last week in San Francisco. The breadth and magnitude of projects and skills in the Java community is amazing, and this keynote samples some of it. Grab some popcorn, click the image below, and settle in for some geeky entertainment :-)
Regards,
James Weaver
I had the pleasure of addressing the Chicago Java Users Group and jamming with JUG leader Freddy Guime in the process. The presentation was a gentle introduction to features in Java 8 such as Lambdas, the Streams API, the new Date/Time API, new JavaFX features, and Java Mobile Edition 8. To demonstrate multi-touch and 3D features, I played some blues on the ZenGuitar JavaFX app while Freddy riffed on his real guitar. Please watch the video below to learn about features of Java 8, launched in March 2014.
You can view the slides from the presentation below:
By the way, the folks at SANDEC have ported ZenGuitar to their SimpleFX DSL. Very cool stuff!
Regards,
James Weaver
@JavaFXpert
The JavaFX 8 API, which is bundled with JDK 8, contains a new UI control known as the DatePicker. This video demonstrates how to use NetBeans 7.4 beta to create a JavaFX application from scratch that contains a DatePicker. It also touches on using Java lambda expressions to simplify event handling. In addition, the new date/time API is discussed, and the JFXtras CalendarPicker is demonstrated.
Note: In the video, my statement that "DatePicker extends ComboBox" should have been "DatePicker extends ComboBoxBase".
Regards,
Jim Weaver
One of the very interesting and useful platforms for JavaFX is touch enabled devices such as Windows 8 tablets. This session at JayDay/Munich on 01-Jul-2013 will demonstrate a variety of JavaFX applications running on a Surface Windows 8 Pro, pointing out capabilities in JavaFX designed to leverage touch capabilities.
The slides presented at this session are shown in the SlideShare presentation below. The code for the demos presented in the session is on GitHub. I hope to see you at JayDay!
Jim Weaver
With continued progress on JDK 8 efforts, I thought we'd explore some of its features together over the next few blog posts. Features added to Java in JDK 8 include:
The first feature I'd like to touch on in this series is lambda expressions, also known as closures. A lambda expression is a function that may have parameters, an expression or block of code, optionally returning a value.
One very convenient use of lambda expressions is to simplify event handling. Typically, event handling is implemented with the help of an anonymous inner class, as shown in the following code snippet.
The anonymous inner class shown above is of type EventHandler, which has one abstract method, named handle. Any interface that has exactly one abstract method is known as a functional interface, and may be replaced by a lambda expression. The following code snippet contains a lambda expression that replaces the anonymous inner class in the previous code snippet. Note that the type of the lambda is inferred by the compiler as EventHandler<ActionEvent> because the onAction() method takes an object of type EventHandler<ActionEvent>. Furthermore, EventHandler has a single method handle(). Therefore, the lambda expression must be an implementation of the handle() method.
The parameter in this lambda expression must be an ActionEvent, because that is the type specified by the handle() method of the EventHandler interface. We can therefore simplify this lambda expression further because the parameter type is inferred, as shown in the following snippet.
When a lambda expression has a single parameter and its type is inferred, the parentheses are not required, as shown in the following snippet.
Because the block of code in our lambda expression contains only one statement, we can simplify it even further as shown in the following snippet.
The listing below contains a modified version of the MetronomeTransition example from the Pro JavaFX 2 book. Specifically, the event handlers in the listing below use lambda expressions rather than anonyomous inner classes.
Here's a screenshot of the MetronomeTransition example in action:
To compile and run this example, you'll need to download an early access release of JDK 8. You also may want to download NetBeans with preliminary JDK 8 support which is aware of lambda expression syntax.
Future articles in this JDK 8 series will dig deeper into lambdas and related topics such as bulk data operations for collections referenced at the beginning of this post. Have fun experimenting with lambda expressions and JDK 8 in general!
Regards,
James Weaver
james dot weaver at oracle dot com
Just a note of appreciation to the JavaFX community in Japan for creating the JavaFX Advent Calendar, which is a series of JavaFX articles leading up to Christmas 2012. Not only did they create the articles, many of the authors translated their articles in English to share with people like me that don't currently read Japanese. There is a table in the JavaFX Advent Calendar page that has links to all of the articles that were translated to English.
Some of the articles also have JavaFX sample applications, like the sample e-book reader by a developer whose Twitter name is @tarchan:
Here's an article and game app by a developer whose Twitter name is @Fukai_yas that demonstrates why the Earth wasn't destroyed as the Mayan calendar predicted (^_^)
Please take a look at this series of articles, and join me in thanking these authors and developers for their work!
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas,
Jim Weaver
The JFXtras project, located at JFXtras.org, provides UI controls and other Java objects that developers often need in their day-to-day work, but that are currently missing from JavaFX. This project also serves as a proving ground for controls that may some day make it into the official JavaFX distribution. The brief video below gives you an introduction to the JFXtras project, and demostrates the UI controls and gauges that are currently available.
Regards,
Jim Weaver
There is another group of geeks, known as Devoxxians, that gather every fall in Belgium to attend a Java programming conference named Devoxx. I'm very happy to say that Gerrit Grunwald and I are two of those Devoxxians, and we'll be presenting a three-hour university session on JavaFX. This session occurs on Tuesday, 13 November 2012 at 1:30pm, and is targeted at Java developers that would like to learn to use the JavaFX APIs that are now included with Java.
Much of this session will draw upon the work in the Pro JavaFX 2 book that I co-authored, as well as the UI controls and gauges that Gerrit created for the open source JFXtras project. Some of the areas that we'll cover are:
During the session we'll have brief guest appearances by JavaFX developers such as Martin Gunnarson and Pär Sikö, Stephen Chin, Angela Caicedo, Jonathan Giles, Johan Vos, and Jasper Potts. We'll also be awarding ten copies of the Pro JavaFX 2 book to participative audience members :-)
We look forward to seeing you in our JavaFX university session at Devoxx!
Regards,
Jim Weaver and Gerrit Grunwald
Community activity surrounding JavaFX has been steadily growing, with tweets, blog posts, and projects increasing in number. I'm pleased to announce that there is now a JavaFX community site on Java.net at the following URL:
The main purpose of this site is to provide a focal point for the JavaFX community, where relevant blog posts, tweets, and other resources may be easily found. Gerrit Grunwald and I are the community leaders for this site, and we welcome your feedback on how we can make this JavaFX Community site more useful to you!
Regards,
Jim Weaver
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