I had my Jazoon talk this morning on building data rich user interfaces with JavaFX. In an informal poll before the start, it seemed like many of the attendees had not yet tried JavaFX, so hopefully this has encouraged them to give it a spin.

I posted the slides from the talk on Slideshare for the benefit of folks who couldn’t make it out to Zurich this week. The agenda for the talk was as follows:

• JavaFX Technology Stack
• Data Binding
• JavaFX 1.3 Controls
• Control Styling
• JavaFX 1.3 Layouts
• Web Service Integration
• JFXtras Data-driven ControlsApropos Demo

There is a lot of new information here on CSS styling and layouts in JavaFX 1.3 as well as some pre-announcements on some new bind functionality we are working on in the JFXtras project. If you are interested in more details, please let me know in the comments section and I can follow up with subsequent blog posts.

Without further ado, here are the slides from today’s talk:

You can also download the slides as a PDF.

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!

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):

Draw JFXtras Sample Application

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:

• Improved performance – The borders render much more quickly, because they take advantage of the new layout infrastructure. This means you can layer and nest borders to your heart’s content without worrying about slow rendering or resizing.
• Developer-friendly properties – The border properties are still available via CSS, but can now easily be set using variables on the classes as well.
• Shape-to-Fit support – There is a new property on the border class called shapeToFit that allows you to choose between having the border fill the available width/height or hugging the component.

Layouts Reloaded

What JFXtras release would be complete without at least a partial layout rewrite?  Well, the JavaFX team didn’t leave us much of a choice here, given all the great work they did on layouts in JavaFX 1.2.

The good news is that Amy Fowler and I were mostly on the same wavelength, so the upgrade should be relatively painless.  Here are some of the reasons to use the new JFXtras layout classes:

• Take advantage of JavaFX 1.2 features – All the JFXtras layouts will honor layoutInfo constraints set on Nodes such as hpos, vpos, and managed.
• Plus Extended layout features – JFXtras layers fill, span, grow, and full support for resizable layouts.  Simply drop in the ResizableXXX replacement classes (ResizableScene, ResizableHBox, ResizableImageView, etc.) and forget about manual binding of layouts.
• Plus the JFXtras Defaults System – Most components want to be laid out a certain way.  For example, you usually want Labels left aligned and TextBoxes to grow horizontally.  JFXtras provides defaults for all the new JavaFX 1.2 controls so you don’t have to.
• And still the best Grids around – The JFXtras Grid and MigLayout have both been fully updated to work with JavaFX 1.2.  Combined together, you have the most powerful layout system available for JavaFX (or any RIA platform) period.

A great way to learn about the JFXtras layouts is by reading Chapter 8 of the Pro JavaFX Platform book.  It goes over a complex MediaExplorer Sample built from the ground up using all the JFXtras layouts from ResizableScene to Grid to MigLayout.

JavaFX Wrapper for Swing

Amy had a great blog that described how to makeover a JavaFX application by embedding Swing, but how about going the other direction?  With the new SceneToJComponent class, you can do exactly that from a standard API like this:

public SceneToJComponentTest() {
    String sceneClass = "org.jfxtras.scene.SceneToJComponentScene";
    setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
    setTitle("FX Panel Test");
    getContentPane().setLayout(new BorderLayout());

    JComponent theScene = SceneToJComponent.loadScene(sceneClass);
    getContentPane().add(new JLabel("JLabel: The following is a JavaFX Scene"), BorderLayout.NORTH);
    getContentPane().add(theScene, BorderLayout.CENTER);

    pack();
}

This class allows you convert any JavaFX Scene to a Swing JComponent that can be embedded in a larger application, insulating you from future changes in the JavaFX internal APIs.

Full List of Features, Enhancements, and Changes

For existing JFXtras users who want all the gory details that they will need to migrate their applications and take advantage of new features, here it is:

• JavaFX Wrapper for Swing:
  • The new SceneToJComponent class makes it easy to wrap your JavaFX user interface in a JComponent that you can use from any Swing UI
  • This insulates you from directly calling the JavaFX internal APIs, which may change in any release.
• JavaFX 1.2 Compatibility:
  • This breaks binary compatibility with old versions.  Please recompile all your code
• JSONHandler:
  • Enhanced variable name mapping support
• JFXtras Borders Changes:
  • Border child is now in a parameter called “node” rather than “content”
  • New shapeToFit property to choose between matching the container set width/height or wrapping the nested node
  • Properties are now exposed directly on the border classes in addition to being accessible from CSS.
  • Various border tweaks…  ShapeBorder is now used for clipping, TitledBorder has a line, etc.
• JFXtras Layout Changes:
  • HAlign/VAlign have been removed in favor of using the new built-in HPos/VPos classes.
  • Fill is not an orthoganal property in its own class used by ExtendedLayoutInfo (which extends LayoutInfo)
  • Grow and span are now on a new GridLayoutInfo class that extends ExtendedLayoutInfo
  • Layout contants are now all in the new LayoutConstants class (formerly GridContraints)
  • ResizableHBox/ResizableVBox have been updated with the new hpos/vpos/nodeHPos/nodeVPos parameters from HBox/VBox
  • ResizableScene now support nodeHPos/nodeVPos parameters
  • Deck now supports nodeHPos/nodeVPos parameters
  • Grid position default is LEFT/MIDDLE
  • Grid now supports nodeHPos/nodeVPos parameters
  • Grid now handles toFront/toBack correctly (and is the only layout in existence that does)
  • New DefaultLayout class for supporting the JFXtras defaults system
  • New JFXContainer class created to support JFXtras layout extensions
  • Removed org.jfxtras.layout.EmptyBorder.  User org.jfxtras.scene.border.EmptyBorder instead.
• Component Changes:
  • ScrollView now uses JavaFX ScrollBar and ClipView
• MigLayout Changes
  • MigLayout fixed to make it work with JavaFX 1.2.
  • MigLayout handles dynamic changes to node sizes and their layoutInfo’s managed flag
  • MigLayout code is no longer forked (thanks to nativearrary support in JavaFX!)
• JFXtras Shapes changes:
  • JFXtras Shapes are now defined as native JavaFX shapes
  • Shapes are generally more fault tolerant to invalid parameter values
  • Almond & Asterisk ‘width’ is now from left to right rather than left-to-center or center-to-right.
  • Asterisk arm width is now as specified (was twice as wide.)
  • ReuleauxTriangle is treated as a spherical object and has centerX, centerY, and radius, rather than x/y/width.
  • All shapes use native JavaFX transforms; specifically, angle of rotation is clockwise rather than counterclockwise as before.
  • All shapes rotate about their bounds center rather than around a starting point – as do all Path-based native JavaFX shapes.

Thanks to the whole JFXtras team, and especially Steve Bixby, Jim Clarke, Dean Iverson, and Keith Combs, for making this release possible.

Enjoy the new JFXtras Release!