Steve On Java

I am pleased to announce the formation of a new Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group.  While this group is rooted in the SF Bay Area, we also plan to make it easy for remote attendees to watch and participate by doing live streaming of our meetings via USTREAM and allowing remote participation through Google Moderator.

For the initial launch meeting on December 9th we are fortunate to have Richard Bair as the presenter.  For those of you who don’t know him, he is a JavaFX lead developer, JavaOne Rockstar Speaker, has an awesome blog, and will be talking about JavaFX at Devoxx (where I am also presenting).  He is also a great sparring partner on almost any technical topic (speaking from experience), so Q&A should be lots of fun!

The SvJugFx Homepage is on Meetup.com where you can sign up to become a member and register for the December 9th session with Richard:

This is the first JavaFX User Group in the U.S. to my knowledge.  Although Japan has the title of world’s first JavaFX User Group as reported on Jim Weaver’s blog.

We have an early Halloween treat from the WidgetFX team… a new software release!  The 1.2.4 version of WidgetFX includes some new functionality and fixes a number of issues that our user community has requested.

New SlideShow Widget

The SlideShow widget was completely rewritten from scratch for this release.  It makes use of the pre-release JFXtras XShelf component for transitions and paging forward and back.  Simply click on the side images to scroll forwards and backwards through your library.

Here is a picture of the new SlideShow widget in action, paging through a set of Halloween pictures (courtesy of Keith Combs):

Happy Halloween from the WidgetFX Team!

If you are enough of an Anime buff to know which series these pictures came from, be sure to leave a comment below!

Auto-start on 64-Bit and International Systems

Japanese WidgetFX Article

The link that gets created to restart WidgetFX now picks up the correct JVM version on 64-bit systems and even handles paths properly for non-US versions of Windows.  This is very important for our friends outsides the US, such as the growing Japanese WidgetFX community.  As an example, check out this translated Japanese article in @IT by long-time WidgetFX developer, Hideki Kobayashi (he is also responsible for the Japanese location of our website).

If you have trouble running WidgetFX on a 64-bit system, make sure you have the 32-bit JVM installed on your machine.  This can be installed side-by-side with a 64-bit JVM, and is required for JavaFX applications to run.

Certificate Update

Our application signing certificate expired, producing warnings upon launch of WidgetFX.  We have generated a new certificate, which should be good for another year.

If you noticed any problems with launching WidgetFX this week, please try again.  We ran into a Webstart bug where it did not correctly update the jar file after the certificate upgrade causing a verification error on start-up.  We were able to fix this by doing nothing but revving the version (missing some great opportunities for bad puns on the intermediate 1.2.3 version number).

And Some Bugfixes…

We are always fixing small bugs or issues as they come up.  One in particular was an infinite loop during start-up caused by some specific network settings.

If you notice any issues with WidgetFX, let us know so we can make it better!

Keith Combs and I did a presentation on JavaFX and WidgetFX at Silicon Valley Code Camp this past weekend to a packed room (see below for the slides).  This was my first time visiting SVCodeCamp and I was very impressed…  With a 2 day total of over 1700 attendees, it was the place to be in the Bay Area!

The highlight of our presentation was a new secret project I just finished (literally 1 hour before the presentation started).  It is called the JUG SpinnerWheel, and is a complete rewrite of Jim Weaver‘s classic Java User Group Prize Wheel:

Clearly this is not rigged if I had to spin it 26 times!

The revamped JUG SpinnerWheel includes a pseudo-3d rendered prize wheel, web service integration to meetup.com to retrieve event participants, and a winner display featuring the prototype JFXtras Table component.

We used this for the first time, and successfully gave away 3 copies of the Pro JavaFX Platform book to audience members eager to learn more about JavaFX!

You can find the full slides from the presentation (including details about the web service implementation of the JUG SpinnerWheel) on SlideShare:

Happy JavaFX hacking!