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)

XShelfView (browse demo source)

XPicker (browse demo source)

Advanced Layouts

The JFXtras layouts include the XGrid, XMigLayout, and Resizable versions of Stack, HBox, and VBox.  All of these layouts support dynamic animation and a powerful defaults system.  The JFXtras XGrid has been contributed back to Oracle and will be included in the JavaFX 1.3 release.

XGrid (browse demo source)

Wipe Library

Wipe transitions including: blind, fade-out, fade-reveal, fade, fade-zoom, flip-180, reveal, shape, slide-over, slide, and swing-in as featured in Simon Morris’ JavaFX in Action book.

Wide Demo (browse demo source)

Shapes

JFXtras includes a wide selection of skinnable shapes including: Almond, Arrow, Asterisk, Astroid, Balloon, Cross, Donut, ETriangle, Gear, ITriangle, Lauburu, RTriangle, Rays, RegularPolygon, ResizableEllipse, ResizableRectangle, ReuleauxTriangle, RoundPin, Sphere, and Star.

Shapes Demo (browse demo source)

Borders

We also have a large set of skinnable borders including: bevel, ellipse, empty, etched, frame, image, line, metallic, pipe, raised, rounded, shape, soft, and titled.

Borders Demo (browse demo source)

And a Whole Lot More

Here are some of the other features JFXtras has to offer:

• XStore Data Storage – Simple persistence of JavaFX primitives and sequences with defaults, auto-save, and save-on-exit.
• Asynchronous JavaFX Support (for experts only) – Allows invocation of JavaFX code off the EDT either via a SwingWorker-style callback or a set of closure-driven primitives.
• Swing Integration – Via the original SceneToJComponent wrapper or the new, easier to use, JXScene class.
• Custom Cursors and Paints – Allows you to use custom cursors and custom paints within your JavaFX application via a special Toolkit as featured in Jeff Friesen’s articles.
• Interpolatable and HSB Gradients – Ever wanted to animate a color?  This is the perfect solution, complete with support for an HSB color palette.
• Bindable XMap – A simplified map syntax for use with JavaFX that includes bind support on gets.
• Image Caching – An image caching library that supports high performance, asynchronous loading and sizing of images from URLs.

Documentation

The full API is documented online here:

http://jfxtras.googlecode.com/svn/site/javadoc/release-0.6/index.html

We also have a new documentation wiki on the JFXtras website.  Please browse it for ideas on how to use the JFXtras components and feel free to comment or contribute back to the docs to make them better:

http://jfxtras.org/portal/core

Migrating from Previous Releases

In order to avoid name collisions with the built-in JavaFX classes, we have undergone a fairly aggressive renaming strategy on all scene graph classes.  If you have been using an earlier version of JFXtras, you will have to rename your usages by pre-pending an X before the class name.  Going forward this will reduce the likelihood of collisions with JavaFX built-in classes and make it easier to visually inspect code that uses a mix of JavaFX and JFXtras classes.

Some other migration changes that you need to take into account include:

• The fill layout constraint has been changed from an enumeration to two booleans (hfill, vfill).
• The Grid border feature has been replaced with a general purpose margin on XLayoutInfo
• The Deck class has been renamed to XStack
• All the layout classes starting with Resizable* have changed to X* (when in doubt try the JavaFX class name prepended with an X)

JFXtras Test

There is also a matching release of JFXtras Test so you can do behavior-driven development with a declarative JavaFX syntax.  We use this for all the unit tests in JFXtras and encourage you to do the same on your projects.  Some of the new JFXtras Test features include:

• Asynchronous Testing Support – Test background processes such as HttpRequests
• JUnit Integration – Integrate JFXtras Test in your Ant or Maven build using a standard JUnit runner

Download it and give it at try!

Credits

Some of the folks I would like to thank for making this release possible include:

• Jim Weaver for inspiring me to start this project and being a great mentor.
• Keith Combs for assisting me on various bits and putting up with my perfectionism on everything.
• Jim Clarke for being the most productive JavaFX coder at Oracle who is not on the core team.
• Dean Iverson for bringing MigLayout to JFXtras and being the clean code guru (see his article on code conventions).
• David Armitage for contributing some great controls and making sure our documentation was top notch.
• Tom Eugelink for being our voice of sanity on the mailing list and being polite about my past mistakes in misattributing his work.
• Pedro Duque Vieira for making the world a safer place for Swing developers with JXScene.
• John Freeman for contributing a very high quality JTable wrapper that I always underpromote.
• And also: Peter Pilgrim, Christophe DUFOUR, Joshua Marinacci, Simon Morris, Andres Almiray, Jeff Friesen, Andrew Hughes, and Liu Huasong.

All these widgets are available and working today on the WidgetFX 1.2 release.  To run WidgetFX, simply go to the WidgetFX home page and click on the Launch Dock link: http://widgetfx.org/

Here is a list of the major changes in this release:

• Improved Performance – The widget dock, as well as all widgets will benefit from performance improvements in JavaFX 1.2.
• Built-in Layout – Widgets now have an onLayout() function that can be used to layout the top-level nodes.
• Signed Widgets – Widgets can now be signed with certificates to get out of the sandbox and gain access to system resources.
• Additional API Hooks – New event handlers for onShow and onHide.
• Macintosh Bugfixes – Transparency now works with the latest JDK (1.6.0_13), and dialog interaction issues have been fixed.

You too can be a widget author and win some free prizes in our widget development contest.  The deadline is July 31st with a grand prize of a year’s worth of free books donated by my publisher, Apress.

WidgetFX Developer Contest

Happy Widget Hacking!

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!

I am pleased to announce the 0.4 release of the JFXtras project.  This is a pretty significant release for the project, which includes quite a bit of new functionality, as well as a new project subdivision.

The JFXtras project has been split into the following three subprojects:

• JFXtras Core – Contains everything you need to quickly and easily build rich JavaFX applications.  This includes Layouts, UI Controls, Shapes, Borders, Utilities, etc.
• JFXtras Test – This provides a comprehensive unit and UI test suite along with wrappers for running from the command line or a visual client (coming soon).
• JFXtras Samples – This is a new project dedicated to providing high quality JavaFX samples to teach the language and bootstrap innovation.  More on this coming in the next few weeks, but if you are interested in contributing or helping out let me know.

The release today is for JFXtras Core, which is now Java 1.5 compatible, and includes some brand new features courtesy of Jim Clarke.  This includes a wide assortment of styleable Borders:

New JFXtras Borders Support

As well as:

• Styleable ScrollBars and ScrollViews
• A JSON Handler to automagically populate JavaFX objects from a remote connection

Which is in addition to a whole slew of other cool features including:

• A new Constraints system for specifying how nodes are laid out with a uniform API
• Significant updates to the JFXtras Grid
• New resizable layouts including: ResizableCustomNode, ResizableImageView, ResizableMediaView, ResizableHBox, ResizableVBox, and updates to ResizableRectangle
• A new version of the Shapes library
• An ImageFix class that resolves backgroundLoading issues and an ImageUtility class to help with common operations
• Defect fixes for Shapes, Dialogs, and others

You can download the latest bits here:  http://code.google.com/p/jfxtras/downloads/list.  And also browse the online Javadocs.

Thanks to the whole JFXtras crew for putting together another huge release!

The JFXtras 0.3 release is out with full support for JavaFX 1.1, as well as JavaFX MigLayout support.  You can download the latest bits here:

http://code.google.com/p/jfxtras/downloads/list

Since JavaFX 1.1 is not binary compatible with the 1.0 JavaFX release, if you are doing any development with JavaFX 1.1 you will need to upgrade to the newly released version 0.3 of JFXtras.  Similarly, if you want to do any development on legacy JavaFX 1.0 applications, you will need to stick with JFXtras 0.2 or earlier.

The major feature in this release is the inclusion of a MigLayout wrapper that gives you all the power of MigLayout from within a native JavaFX syntax (a big thanks to Dean Iverson for making this happen).  Here is an example of Mig Docking in action:

MigLayout Docking Test

The intent is to keep both the JFXtras Grid and MigLayout as fully supported options for JavaFX layout.  The choice is yours which one to use!

Some other changes that went into this release as well include:

• Modified permissions in JFXWorker, JFXException, and JFXDialog from public-init to public-init protected
• Fixed alwaysOnTop support and added an icon workaround to JFXDialog
• Deprecated CacheSafeGroup now that the underlying bug has been fixed

This release made it in roughly 5 days total, but only 2 business days after the JavaFX 1.1 Release.  Special thanks to Keith Combs for packaging up the release!