Steve On Java

My Devoxx university session yesterday was packed, which was awesome!  It was 3 hours of hard-core JavaFX knowledge, and almost everyone stayed for the duration.  Aaron Houston got a great shot of the venue (more on the Java Champions site):

I posted my slides on SlideShare, so check it out when you get a chance.  Special thanks to my co-authors, Jim, Weiqi, and Dean for help with the content.

For those of you at Devoxx, I also posted a new LearnFX question.  Please launch it with the link below and respond before or during my conference session tomorrow at 1:30PM to be eligable to win a prize!

More updates after my conference session tomorrow!

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:

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!

We have had quite a few additions to the project team over the past couple weeks.

Please join me in welcoming the following folks:

• Jonathan Giles – Jonathan is best known for his weekly Java Desktop Links of the Week, and recently (yesterday) contributed a very high quality JavaFX menu bar component to the JFXtras project.  Here is a link to his most recent blog entry on the subject:

  http://jonathangiles.net/blog/?p=566

• Rakesh Menon – Rakesh, a member of the Sun JavaFX team, has been building out a set of standard JavaFX parsers for various services such as Twitter, Yahoo, and Flickr.  He will be contributing these to the JFXtras project for incorporation in a future release.  You can read more about his JavaFX exploits on his blog:
  http://blogs.sun.com/rakeshmenonp/
• Jeff Friesen – JavaJeff is a developer and educator who wrote the very first article on JFXtras for JavaWorld.  He has agreed to contribute his Custom Cursors and Custom Paints to the JFXtras project from his popular java.net articles.  There is some documentation and testing needed before this is ready for release if anyone is interested in volunteering.
• Till Ballendat – Till created some great widgets for the WidgetFX Contest, and graciously offered to submit some of his components to the JFXtras project.  He has already checked in his MultiLineTextBox component from his Twitter widget.
• Liu Huasong – Liu (a.k.a. goodsforyou) has started contributing some of his code from real JavaFX projects.  His most recent check-in included some advanced gradients including an HSB variant for Linear and Radial gradients.
• Simon Morris – Simon, author of the upcoming JavaFX in Action book, has contributed a wipe transitions library.  It needs a little bit of documentation and work, so if anyone is interested in helping to productize this, let me know!

And also the following contributors to the JFXtras Community Site:

• Carl Dea – Carl was winner of the “Dude, Where’s My Pass?” JavaOne contest, and has become a JavaFX community champion.  He has taken the JFXtras Links page and run with it, so please be sure to check out his latest work.
• David Armitage – David contributed his JFXMines application to the JFXtras Samples library.  He also prodded me to get the Community Forum going.
• Sten Anderson – Sten is winner of the JavaFX 25K Challenge, and has released the full source code for his winning entry, Music Explorer FX, to the JFXtras Samples repository.
• Mark Macumber – Mark is one of our first project members who did early work on charting.  He recently contributed a Hudson charting mash-up to the JFXtras Samples library.

And of course our long-time contributors including: Jim Clarke, Dean Iverson, Keith Combs, Steven Bixby, and Jim Weaver.

If you are interested in joining the JFXtras team, we have plenty of work to go around.  Please drop a note on the JFXtras Developers mailing list and let us know what you are interested in helping out with.

Last night I presented at the SDForum Java SIG to a very engaged and enthusiastic crowd.  This was the longest presentation to date, but the audience was great, and even stayed afterwards to ask questions.  Also, Rich Rein was an outstanding host, inviting us out to drink beers until midnight after the event (I hope his wife wasn’t upset!)

This is my last presentation gig until Devoxx at the end of the year, but I was able to get a great screencast recording of the session, which you can watch in full resolution on blip.tv:

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

Note: The end of the presentation got cut off due to a technical glitch in Camtasia, but to their credit it recovered the bulk of the recording on restart.

You can also browse the slide decks at your own pace in PDF format:

Part A (JFXtras): SuperchargingWithJFXtras-SDForum

Part B (WidgetFX): SuperchargingWithWidgetFX-SDForum

I hope you enjoy the video and slides!

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?

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!

I am proud to announce the official launch of the JFXtras Community Site.  This site is a resource for the entire JavaFX community, and open for participation by all.

Just like the JFXtras open-source library has been helping improve the JavaFX Platform, this site is focused on helping to expand and grow the JavaFX Community.  Some things you can do on the site today include:

Explore -

The JFXtras Samples section is the largest JavaFX example repository outside of Sun, and is specifically focused on teaching JavaFX concepts from beginner to advanced.  Some of the featured samples include:

• Amy Fowler’s Boundisizer – Learn how to transform and manipulate nodes like a champ from Amy Fowler, the acclaimed layout expert on the JavaFX team.
• Music Explorer FX – You may not have won the 25 thousand dollar prize, but you can learn from the expert.  Sten Anderson has posted his winning entry, and promised to share the full source code shortly (no pressure, Sten!)
• Particle-O-Rama – Josh Marinacci, JavaFX evangelist and Rockstar¹, creates another visual extravaganza with his super-customizable particle demo.
• Generating Graphs from Hudson – Mark Macumber posted a great mash-up of the JavaFX 1.2 Charting support to display Hudson build status.

The site is completely self-service, and provides free hosting of open-source JavaFX samples, so create an account and start contributing your own samples to grow the community!

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1. Yes, it is official, Joshua Marinacci and I are JavaOne Rockstars!  Josh and I received the JavaOne Rockstar award for having a top ranked JavaOne session this year (thanks to everyone who attended our WidgetFX Session!)

Learn -

Through a collaborative effort from all the JavaFX book authors, we will be able to bring you the full set of samples from all 5 of the JavaFX books.  All the source code will be made available under a commercial-friendly open-source license, and the samples will be easily browseable online categorized by topic.

What is on your bookshelf?

This includes all of the samples from Pro JavaFX Platform, which is finally out in print! — The full realization that I was an author didn’t come until this morning when my copies arrived… for a brief moment the gaping hole in my life for the past six months seemed (almost) worth it.

The Sun JavaFX and Essential JavaFX books have been out since JavaOne and are great references to get started coding in JavaFX.  These samples should be available within the next couple weeks.

Finally, the JavaFX in Action and JavaFX Developer’s Guide books are both due out later this year, and will post samples as soon as it makes sense to.

Research -

There is also a new section called JFXtras Links brought to you by Jonathan Giles, famous for his weekly desktop links of the week feature on his blog.  The plan is to aggregate and categorize all the best JavaFX links and resources in a single place.

This section is still in its infancy, so please give us feedback and contribute links that you find valuable.

About the Site -

The JFXtras Community Site is built on the principles of collaboration and agility, and is backed by technologies that make this possible.  Everything is 100% Java from the application server (Tomcat) to the portal engine (Liferay).  Also, wherever possible customization and design was done via the online portal user interface so that future changes to the site (both minor and major) can be done by the community.

Most importantly, the JFXtras Community Site will be what you make of it.  Just like everything else we do on the JFXtras project, we are open to new ideas and ways of doing things.  If you have a great idea for how to improve one of the existing sections, or something else we should add to the site, let us know, or better yet, help us make it happen!

I will be presenting at the Oakland Java SIG on July 15th.  The topic is “Supercharging Your JavaFX Programs with WidgetFX and JFXtras,” and will include some brand new content based on the WidgetFX 1.2 and JFXtras 0.5 releases.

As usual, I will incur some significant demo risk for the sake of showing some jaw-dropping demo awesomeness!  You will either be totally impressed or get a good laugh at my expense…

If you are in the SF Bay Area, be sure to drop by and check it out!

I am pleased to announce the 0.5 release of JFXtras.  This release updates the project with JavaFX 1.2 support, plus includes a major overhaul of the Shapes, Borders, and Layouts.

You can grab the latest bits here:
http://code.google.com/p/jfxtras/downloads/list

And browse the Javadoc online.

Pure JavaFX Shapes

Why should you care that we spent months re-implementing all the Shapes from scratch in pure JavaFX code?  Well, here are a few reasons:

1. JavaFX 1.2 Compatibility - The JavaFX scene graph was pretty-much rewritten from the ground up in the 1.2 release, so porting the old Shape code was non-trivial.
2. Mobile Deployment - Yes, you can now draw stars, balloons, and reuleaux triangles on your new HTC Diamond.  (What, you didn’t pick up a JavaFX Mobile device at JavaOne?  Your loss…)
3. Richard Bair said to do it…  Rich isn’t the sort of guy you say no to, and he was pretty adament about the fact that we shouldn’t be hacking the scene graph directly.  Well, now we aren’t.  (although don’t let him know about our new hack to embed JavaFX in Swing…)

You can try out the new shapes by running the DrawJFXtras sample program from the Pro JavaFX Platform book (which has an entire chapter dedicated to the JFXtras project and other JavaFX FOSS):

Note:  When playing with the demo be careful using the balloon and rounded rectangle shapes.  They trigger a nasty bounds-detection bug that we still haven’t tracked down.

Thanks to my coworker, Steve Bixby for doing the rewrite in his spare time.  He was looking for a little project to learn JavaFX, and went way above and beyond!

Redesigned Borders

We also redesigned the JFXtras Borders from scratch.  Here are some of the new and noteworthy improvements:

• Read the rest of this entry »

I am pleased to announce the JFXtras 0.2 Release!  This release features a new custom shape library that came out of a joint effort with the jSilhouette Project.  Thanks to Andres Almiray and Dean Iverson for making this happen in time for the release!

You can download the 0.2 Release directly from the Google Code project site under Feature Downloads:  http://code.google.com/p/jfxtras/

The following screenshot gives you a taste of what the new shape library is capable of:

In addition to this, there were lots of enhancements to the existing components, including the following changes:

JFXtras Grid Enhancements:

• Fixed triggering of updates in the Grid when a child min/max/pref size changes
• Added in cell defaults for nested Grids
• Fixes a defect with where packed dialogs could not be repositioned
• Fixes a defect with dialog modality when packed is set to false
• Improved the succinctness of expressing Grid layouts with a new syntax (backwards compatible with the 0.1 syntax):
  • new row function that allows more concise expression of row contents
  • modified cell constraint names to be shorter (old names are still supported, but deprecated)
  • added in a helper class (GridConstraints) with a set of disambiguated static imports that can be used to more succinctly express constraints

JFXtras Test Improvements:

• Added additional test expectations:
  • is (decorator)
  • isNot
• Fixed null handling of test expectation methods
• Changed nested test behavior to setup and teardown per subtest
• Shorted “assumeThat” to “that” for test fluency

Enjoy the new release, and please join the mailing list to give us feedback or request new features!

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.

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!