JavaFX 1.3 has just gone live on JavaFX.com.  This release is deceptively small, but has an enormous number of changes under the hood.  In this post I will take you through the Top 10 major features, giving you background information I learned from working with the JavaFX team, and flooding you with details on interesting tidbits you might otherwise miss.

JavaFX 1.3 Top 10 Features

1. New Controls

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I am pleased to announce the 0.6 release of the open-source JFXtras project, the largest 3rd party library of JavaFX add-ons.  This release is a very large undertaking that represents the work of several dozen contributors over the past 6 months.

JFXtras 0.6 will work with any JavaFX release in the 1.2 family.  We recommend using the very latest release (currently JavaFX 1.2.3), which can be downloaded from JavaFX.com.

Starting immediately, we will be focusing on developing a JavaFX 1.3 compatible JFXtras release.  Our plan is to release a 1.3 compatible version of JFXtras within 1 week of the official release announcement from Oracle.  To hear about future JFXtras release announcements, make sure to follow my blog.

JFXtras Functionality

To make it easier to see some of the JFXtras capabilities in action, I have included Web Start demos from our component test library.  It may take a minute or two to load the first demo, but after that the rest should launch instantaneously.

Data-Driven Controls

The JFXtras controls include a Table, Tree, Shelf, Calendar, PasswordBox, Picker, Spinner, MultiLineTextBox, ScoreBoard, and Menu.  Many of these controls can be driven off a dynamic data provider that gives back incremental results from an asynchronous operation, such as a Web Service call.

XTableView (browse demo source)

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To bring in the New Year, I did a complete revamp of my blog.  WordPress.com served me well initially, but the limitations started to cramp my style.  Now I am off the corporate cloud and running on a 100% Open Source platform.

Here are some of the benefits of the new blogging platform:

• Inline JavaFX and Java applets – No need to click a link or launch a web start application to see my latest creations.
• Embedded videos – I can now embed videos from all 3rd party sites, including developer favorites like Parleys.com.
• Unencumbered styling – No limitations on what I can do with styles and themes for the site (although I promise to keep it tame!)

I also spent some doing a minor site redesign.  Some of the new features include:

• Updated site theme – Uses the latest Freshy 2 release from Jidé (I guess I am partial to French designers)
• DZone and Twitter post links – Feel free to vote up (or down) anything you see or retweet it to your followers
• Contact form – Good way to directly poke me in case I am asleep at the wheel (sometimes I need a reminder)

I will be taking advantage of all these and other features of the new platform throughout the rest of 2010.

And finally, some local fireworks from the celebration over San Francisco to enjoy:

Happy New Year!

For those of you who don’t know, SvJugFx stands for the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group.  We will be holding our very first meeting this coming Wednesday with a live, streamed presentation from the world renowned Richard Bair (who is now infamous for divulging JavaFX secrets at Devoxx).

Richard Bair Presenting at Devoxx 2009

Yes, I said streamed live…  for those of you who are not fortunate enough to live in Silicon Valley, you can still participate in realtime by doing the following:

1. Sign-up for the SvJugFx meetup group.  This is the primary communication vehicle we will use to announce last-minute changes:
   http://www.svjugfx.org/
   (Note: Everyone can sign up for the group, but please only RSVP for the event if you are physically attending)
2. For the video feed, please go to the following ustream channel:

   http://www.ustream.tv/channel/silicon-valley-javafx-user-group

3. And to participate, please log on to Google Moderator at the following URL:

   http://moderator.appspot.com/#16/e=d528e

The in-person meeting will start on: Wednesday at 6PM PST
The online streaming will start at latest by: 7PM PST (possibly earlier)

Please leave enough time to login on both sites and test your internet and video playback capabilities.  You will be able to watch the live video stream on ustream and respond with your own questions (as well as vote other participant’s questions up and down) via Google Moderator, which we will be monitoring during the presentation.

This is the first time we are trying this format, so we apologize in advance for technical glitches or issues that we are sure will arise.

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

–Winston Churchill

Happy 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!

JavaFX has a very active Twitter community.  Some have even said that the best way to get help with your JavaFX app is to ask on Twitter first.  But how do you know who to follow?

To make it easy to hook in to the JavaFX Twitter community, I put together a JavaFX Twitter Group using the new group support.  To subscribe, simply follow @steveonjava/javafx:

The JavaFX Twitter Group Stream

So who will you find on this list?  Some big names in the JavaFX Community, including:

• Richard Bair, Joshua Marinacci, and Jonathan Giles from the JavaFX team
• JavaFX book authors such as Jim Weaver, Weiqi Gao, Dean Iverson, and Simon Morris
• JavaFX evangelists such as Maijaliisa Burkert, and Anatoli Fomenko
• JavaFX early adopters such as Peter Pilgrim, Sten Karl, Steven Herod, Carl Dea, William Antonio, Pär Dahlberg, Mark Macumber, Tom, Enrique Garcia, Eric Wendelin, Hideki Kobayashi, and many, many others

I tried my best to dig in a few levels deep on the twitter lists of folks I know are active in the JavaFX community so I would get pretty good coverage.  The basic criteria I used for selecting folks was percentage of tweets dedicated to JavaFX discussion.  Most of the folks on the list talk about JavaFX in 50% or more of their tweets, although there are a few notable exceptions (ahem..  Steven Herod).

Please follow the new JavaFX Twitter Group, and if you would like to be followed by the list, tweet me a direct message @steveonjava.

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!

I am pleased to announce the winners of the WidgetFX Developer’s Contest.  There were lots of great entries (22 in total), which made this a very hard decision.  You can browse the full set of entries yourself on the WidgetFX Library page:

http://widgetfx.org/portal/library

To try any of the contest entries below, simply click on the image which will install/open WidgetFX and add the widget to your dock.

1st Place – ScreenshotFX

In first place is Pär Dahlberg with his ScreenshotFX widget.  Pär definitely went above and beyond in all respects, entering a full-blown application for taking screen captures and then editing them in a pop-up window.  Some of the cool features in his application include:

• A delay timer to give you time to arrange windows and menus before the capture occurs
• Multi-monitor support via a drop-down (This was sure to impress Keith)
• Drawing tools to markup the image with annotations
• Crop/Fill and a whole host of other editing tools

Pär has a great blog on JavaFX, WidgetFX, and other topics of interest, so make sure to check out his contest winning speech.

2nd Place – RadioFX

Second place went to Yannick Van Godtsenhoven for his RadioFX Widget.  In terms of visual design and widget polish, Yannick was head-and-shoulders above the competition.

He built a simple, yet functional widget that streams radio over the internet right to your WidgetFX dock.  No more reaching for a web browser to catch your favorite Belgium tunes on StuBru!

Check out Yannick’s blog to hear about the contest results and his experience with JavaFX.

I am definitely looking forward to more great creations from Yannick!

3rd Place – Infix WeatherWidget

Finally, third place went to Larry Dickson for his Infix WeatherWidget.  Besides his Weather widget, he also submitted 3 other widgets including a Clock, Calendar, and G-Mail widget, although his original creation was still the judges’ favorite.

By the way, Larry submitted this widget before the start of the contest, which was perfectly valid.  Similarly, if you submit a widget anytime between now and the start of our next contest you will automatically be entered to win!

Congratulations to all of our winners!!!  I have already sent them their prizes, which were contributed through a generous donation from my publisher, Apress.

WidgetFX Developer Contest

I put together the JFXtras Test 0.5 Release today.  This release includes full support for JavaFX 1.2, new comparison expectations (thanks to Peter Pilgrim!), and asynchronous testing support.

You can download JFXtras Test 0.5 here:
http://code.google.com/p/jfxtras/downloads/list

This will be the final release under this name as the codebase is merged with the FEST project.

So what do you get when JFXtras Test and FEST Unite?

JFXtras Test + FEST = FEST-JavaFX

Here is what you might want:

• A super-sonic drill that pulverizes Gunmen
• An extra face growing out of your stomach with cool shades and a wicked smile
• A special attack with a killer name like “Giga Drill Breaker!”

But you will have to settle with:

• Tests for JavaFX, written in JavaFX
• Behavior-Driven Development
• Fluent Assertions
• Parameterized Tests
• Declarative Unit Testing
• JavaFX UI Testing
• JUnit Integration

Enjoy the final release of JFXtras Test, and look forward to some exciting new work from the FEST-JavaFX project in the months to come!