There were some huge announcements at JavaOne today for the JavaFX platform.  Overall I think the announcements show some very positive momentum for the future of JavaFX and rich client Java, but there were some casualties…

In this blog I will cover the salient bits, but if you would like an opportunity to hear it directly from the JavaFX leadership team in a free event, we will be hosting a JavaFX 2.0 event with Richard Bair and Jai Suri at our next SvJugFX meeting.  As usual, the event will be streamed live, and questions can be asked remotely via Google Moderator.

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The Good Parts:

Java and Alternative JVM Languages

JavaFX has a new API face.  All the JavaFX 2.0 APIs will be exposed via Java classes that will make it much easier to integrate Java server and client code.  This also opens up some huge possibilities for JVM language integration with JavaFX that Jonathan Giles and I explored in our JavaOne talk today.  We did a whirlwind tour through four different JVM languages (Ruby, Clojure, Groovy, and Scala) showing what JavaFX 2.0 code may look like when ported to these different languages.

Here is the full presentation deck:

Which can also be downloaded as a PDF.

Open Source Controls

Thomas Kurian announced a strategy to open source the JavaFX controls going forward.  This is a huge move in the right direction for the platform, and will make life for us third-party control developers much better!  Even though this is not the full platform open sourcing that I have been petitioning for (thanks for all your support!!!), I will still take some of the credit. 

JavaFX 2.0 Proposed Roadmap

Oracle has published a proposed roadmap for JavaFX 2.0 in the 2011 timeframe.  There are some really great things included, many of which I have been campaigning for:

• Multithreading Improvements – The move to Java APIs breaks down some of the barriers to multi-threaded programming that were present with JavaFX.  Presumably a similar model to Swing will exist where you can launch worker threads, but still have to do all UI operations on a main event thread.
• Texture Paint – Interesting to see this highlighted, but its use in JavaFX was pioneered by Jeff Friesen and included in JFXtras 0.7.
• Grid Layout Container + CSS – Very good to see that they are taking the Grid Layout and evolving it.  The addition of making it accessible from CSS will make it an extremely powerful layout container suitable for multiple uses.
• HD Media – Media seems to be getting a big upgrade, which has been long overdue.  This is in addition to other promised improvements in full screen capabilities, media markers, animation synchronization, and low latency audio.
• HTML5 WebView – It is good to see that this is finally getting the attention it deserves.  JavaFX is great for dynamic application development, but is not well suited for content presentation.  The combination of JavaFX + HTML5 will greatly expand the range of applications that can be developed.
• Controls Galore! – TableView, SplitView, TabView, and Rich Text to name a few.  This is a necessity to build robust enterprise applications.
• File (and other) Dialogs – This may seem like a minor point, but is incredibly important for building real applications.

HTML5 Support

Not to be confused with the WebView, there is also a plan for the successor to JavaFX 2.0 (2012 timeframe) to support an alternate HTML5 rendering pipeline.  Not many details are available about this yet, but it could be a huge technological breakthrough if they are able to pull it off successfully.  The practical applications of being able to deploy your JavaFX application to any HTML5 compliant device is enormous.

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The Casualties:

JavaFX Script

JavaFX Script was good to us, but it is no longer a go forward technology for Oracle.  I am a bit disappointed about this move, because it takes away a lot of the productivity benefits that have made JavaFX code a joy to write.  However, many of the promised improvements in JavaFX 2.0 are around language features of JavaFX Script (such as binding and sequences), so hopefully they can maintain some of the benefits.

Richard Bair added a very insightful post on his blog, which goes into more details on the language changes and is well worth a read.

JavaFX Mobile

JavaFX Mobile has not seen a lot of action since JavaOne 2009 and the mobile focus in the keynote was on JavaME and LWUIT.  I am still a big fan of the “write once, run anywhere” mantra, and am waiting for this to return to the mobile space.  With the proliferation of different mobile programming models (Android, iPhone, WebOS, etc.), whoever solves the mobile cross-platform development problem in a technically solid way will profit immensely.

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What’s Next?

Now that Oracle is done with their announcements, I have some of my own.  If you are at JavaOne, drop by my Wednesday session entitled “JFXtras: JavaFX Controls, Layouts, Services, and More” at 2:15 to hear it firsthand, or wait for my blog post shortly following that.

Creating hyperlinks in JavaFX should be in the category of things that are trivially easy, but is complicated by various factors, such as deployment mode and Java version. First I will go into detail on all the different permutations of how you can launch links in a browser and under what circumstances each will work. Next I will give you a nice packaged solution that you can use as a library (if you are impatient, just skip to The Easy Way Out now).  Finally, I will show how you can do the same thing for JavaFX Mobile applications.

A Tale of 3 APIs

There are 3 different ways that you can launch hyperlinks in Java/JavaFX. It helps to have an internet connection such as broadband to be able to launch this. Unfortunately, none of them work in all circumstances, so you need to know when to call each. Here is a quick reference table:

AppletStageExtension

The first option is to use the JavaFX AppletStageExtension. This is only available if you are running as an Applet, but also gives you the most control over how the hyperlink is launched.  In addition to a URL you can also specify a target, which can be any of the standard HTML targets including the following (excerpted from the AppletStageExtension javadocs):

Web Start BasicService

The second option is to use the Web Start BasicService.  This works from both JavaFX Applets and Web Start applications, but does not let you specify the HTML target.  It is effectively the same as using the AppletStageExtension with a target of “_blank”.

Here is a small code excerpt showing how you would call the Web Start BasicService from your JavaFX code:

def basicService = ServiceManager.lookup("javax.jnlp.BasicService") as BasicService;
basicService.showDocument(new URL(url));

Desktop.browse

The third option is to use the new Desktop class introduced in Java 1.6.  This works from Applet, Web Start applications, and Standard Execution (within a desktop Frame).  Unfortunately, it did not exist in Java 1.5, so it won’t work from JavaFX without a little hacking.

The quick and dirty hack is to modify your JavaFX distribution to include the rt.jar from Java 1.6 as explained in this earlier post.  The only problem with this is you also have to get all the other developers on your project to do the same (and redo this on every upgrade).

The friendlier approach is to use reflection to check and see if the Desktop class is available, and then invoke the methods dynamically.  There is quite a bit more boilerplate code, but it will allow you to compile with a plain vanilla JavaFX installation, and also handle the odd case where someone is trying to run JavaFX under 1.5.  (Which is unsupported on Windows/Unix, and is now even supported on 32-bit Mac systems with the release of Snow Leopard!).

Since the code is easier to follow without reflection, I will show that first:

Desktop.getDesktop().browse(new URI(url));

And here is the munged version with reflection:

try {
    def desktopClazz = Class.forName("java.awt.Desktop");
    def desktop = desktopClazz.getMethod("getDesktop").invoke(null);
    def browseMethod = desktopClazz.getMethod("browse", [URI.class] as java.lang.Class[]);
    browseMethod.invoke(desktop, new URI(url));
} catch (e) {
    println("Upgrade to Java 6 or later to launch hyperlinks: {url}");
}

The Easy Way Out

When things are easy to do, they will get done right.  To make sure that JavaFX applications do not fall prey to broken and inconsistent linking, I put together a library for JFXtras that takes care of all the plumbing for you.

There is a new JFXtras class called BrowserUtil that has a very simple API:

BrowserUtil.browse(url);

or

BrowserUtil.browse(url, target);

It is that simple…  Conversion of string URLs to URL or URI objects, selection of the correct API based on your deployment mode, and failover modes based on the Java version are all included.

In addition, I created an extended Hyperlink called the XHyperlink.  This behaves identically to the built-in control, with the addition of simple configuration of URL navigation (this is what hyperlinks are designed for, right?)  The usage of the XHyperlink class is as follows:

XHyperlink {
    text: "Oracle's Homepage", url: "http://oracle.com/"}
}

All of this functionality will be included in the JFXtras 0.6 release.  If you need it now, you can build off the head of our repo.  Otherwise we are working on a release, which I will announce on this blog shortly which you can follow.

What about JavaFX mobile?

None of these desktop techniques actually work on a mobile device, so this is not a 100% solution yet.

Fortunately, there is also a solution for JavaFX Mobile if you are willing to delve in to the Java ME APIs.  To do this you first need to get a handle to the MIDlet like this:

def midlet = com.sun.javafx.runtime.adapter.MIDletAdapter.getMidlet();

And then you can call platformRequest to launch a browser on the mobile device:

midlet.platformRequest(url);

Note: This requires use of private APIs, so this may not work in future JavaFX releases.

It is not possible to merge this in with the desktop solution, because the JavaFX Mobile libraries do not exist on the desktop platform (and vice versa), but it is relatively easy to use this technique yourself by copying and pasting the above code sample into a helper function in your application.