Steve On Java

The JavaFX 1.0 release came out a couple weeks ago, but one of the big questions has been about missing UI functionality, such as layouts, menus, and UI components.  Future release of JavaFX will support this, but in the meantime application developers are stuck up the river without a paddle.

The JFXtras project was conceived out of just such a discussion between Jim Weaver and I as we were brainstorming on all the missing functionality we wished JavaFX supported today.  As a starting point we each had a repository of components and widgets to share, and an endless list of things we wished we had to work with.

Today marks the 0.1 milestone release of JFXtras.  The components are not all complete, but are well documented and very usable for early adopters.

JFXtras Grid in Action

Some of the out-of-the-box components you can take advantage include:

• The JFXtras Grid – Absolute positioning only goes so far, then you need some real layouts.  The JFXtras Grid supports resizable nodes, alignment, span, grow, and even column widths.
• Dialog – The JFXtra Dialog provides a drop-in replacement for a Stage that will pop-up a real Java Dialog. This includes support for an owner window, modality, alwaysOnTop, the ability to hide the taskbar icon, and many other features.
• Testing – The JFXtras test takes all the best testing concepts from junit, hamcrest, rspec, and others, and melds them together with a succinct declarative syntax.
• Asynchronous Worker – Working on the theory that developers deserve their share of rope, JFXtras provides an asynchronous worker wrapper that allows you to execute pure JavaFX code on a background thread.

I will be writing in more depth about how to use the main features of JFXtras here on my blog, so please look forward to it!