JFXtras 0.6 Preview Available!
steveonjava | November 25, 2009Happy Thanksgiving from the JFXtras team! While everyone else is celebrating the holiday with friends and family, we are going to be busy finishing up the 0.6 release.
Wild turkey in LaConner, WA taken by stevevoght
In case you have some spare time between meals and celebration, you can join in the fun too by trying out the JFXtras 0.6 preview release, which can be downloaded here:
http://code.google.com/p/jfxtras/downloads/list
There is a whole slew of new functionality including the following under Common:
- Layouts – Changes to the Grid API in preparation for inclusion in the JavaFX Soma release, and also added animation support to all the layouts.
- Sphere – Pseudo 3D sphere created for the Groovy showdown with Andrey Almiray.
- Gear – New shape from Steve Bixby.
- ManualResizableRectangle – Very useful shape from Yannick’s post.
- JXScene – Pedro’s improved API for Swing integration.
- PaintUtil, HSBColor, new gradients – Liu’s magic paint classes
- Custom Paints – From Jeff Friesen’s excellent article on Custom Paints.
- Custom Cursors – From Jeff Friesen’s excellent article on Custom Cursors.
- Wipe Library – A transition library from Simon Morris’ JavaFX in Action book.
- XMap – A bindable Map implementation for JavaFX.
- XStore – David Armitage’s simple persistence for JavaFX variables using dependency injection.
- ImageCache – Caching of JavaFX images for building high performance applications contributed by Joshua Marinacci.
- XEDT – Simplified event thread mangement for JavaFX infrastructure classes (Warning: Use the JavaFX Task API instead unless you know exactly what you are doing)
And the rest under a new Controls jar:
- XTableView – I am still working on this, but it is very useful already as demonstrated by Jim Weaver’s SpeedReaderFX application.
- XTreeView – Jim Clarke’s Tree Control.
- XCalendarPicker – Tom’s excellent calendar control.
- XPane – A titled region with rounded corners developed by Dean Iverson.
- XPicker – David Armitage did some great work on this… Check out his demo on the JFXtras website.
- XShelfView – A high performance Display Shelf control implementation with support for reflection, titles, and a scrollbar as showcased on JFXStudio.
- XSpinnerWheel – A prize spinner wheel that makes use of pseudo 3D effects as showcased in the JUG Prize Spinner application.
- XMenu – Pure JavaFX Menu developed by Jonathan Giles (this version will be replaced by the official Sun Menu control when it becomes available).
- XPasswordBox – Control from Liu to create a password field.
- XMultiLineTextBox – Till’s control for editing multiple lines of text.
- XSwingTable – From John Freeman, this gives you all the power of a JTable directly from JavaFX code.
For this release we decided to go with a new naming convention to differentiate our classes from the built-in JavaFX layouts and controls. Most of the classes are now prefixed with an “X” for jfXtras. This will make migration slightly more painful now, but prevent future collisions and name changes down the road.
There is also a new version of JFXtras Test. This is the final version that will be released under this name (it is being merged with FEST-JavaFX), but it required an update to work with the new naming convention and to add some much-needed JUnit Runner support (see my Devoxx Conference Presentation for more details).
I probably missed a few things along the way here. You can find the definitive list in the online JavaFXDoc:
http://jfxtras.googlecode.com/svn/site/javadoc/release-0.6/index.html
Please feel free to download the jars and give the preview release a try. We are putting the finishing touches on several of the layouts and controls, so expect a final release in a week or so.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I can’t wait to test in my house tonight(I’m in the company that I work now =[ ).
That’s cool.
I will need to do lot of renaming, but that does make sense as conflicting names are always a nightmare….
Just one question: are you planning to tag the preview and later the 0.6 release in SVN ?
[...] Chin has announced a JFXtras 0.6 preview release has been made available, with a full release coming up as soon as any kinks are worked out. JFXtras 0.6 sees a number of [...]
[...] Chin has announced a JFXtras 0.6 preview release has been made available, with a full release coming up as soon as any kinks are worked out. JFXtras 0.6 sees a number of [...]
I have some questions about what you’ll be doing in the future with XTableView:
1. Any plans to add dynamic column sorting?
2. Any plans to add paging (as an alternative to scrolling)?
Thanks
[...] stating that the next release of JavaFX should have expanded support (as stated here). Also, the JFXtras project is going strong, and they have a lot of controls available that you could [...]
Hi Steve,
Nice those Xtras ! I played a bit around with the Grid and works marvelously. I also went some step beyond, I guess, and tried the mobile profile (early access) in NB 6.8 but I get :
Error preverifying class org.jfxtras.async.ObjectSwingWorker
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: org/jdesktop/swingworker/SwingWorker
ERROR: preverify execution failed, exit code: 1
So i think with the swing dependencies underneath the Xtras are not usable on the mobile profile correct ?
It would be great though to have something like that cross platform but I’m dreaming
Guy
My previous comment is not displayed: was it moderated or is there an issue with the comment entry on this blog post ?
Thanks
Christophe
Looks like you got caught in the lurch on my site redesign/move. (your comment shows up on the old site)
For everyone else’s benefit, here is what Christophe wrote:
========================
Hi,
I submitted an issue on JFXtras forum. Might be a memory leak…
Was not fixed last time I checked 0.6 from SVN. Could you have a look please ?
Thanks a lot.
And happy new year !
========================
Thanks for submitting the defect, Christophe. I should have a fix by the end of the weekend.
Thanks a lot Steve !
Would be good to see more support for functional programming in JavaFX by adding additional sequence functions (e.g. filter, map, zip etc.).
Thanks!
I agree. We have a fold and map function in our JFXtras SequenceUtils class. Filter and other functions would be a welcome addition if you want to help out!
Sorry about the renaming… we had lots of debates on the dev mailing list about what to do, but decided this was the best time to fix it for the future.
Good call on the tagging. I retroactively tagged the preview version in the repository and we will also tag the final release when it comes out.
Column sorting is in the works and will definitely be a feature in the final release.
Paging is not something I was planning on doing, because the table supports incremental loading from the model, which allows you to do virtual lists and gives some of the same benefits as paging.
It would not be hard to incorporate a paging control that wrapped the table and updated the model, so if you would like to contribute something along those lines, it would be greatly appreciated.
Some of the JFXtras components are mobile ready, such as the Grid and Shapes. If you want to include them in your project you have to copy out the relevant source files. Sorry it is such a pain right now, but there is no way to package up third party mobile dependencies cleanly right now.