Night Dreams about NetBeans 7.1, etc.; Day Work Configuring CentOS Linux for JavaFX 2.1

Last night I dreamed seemingly all night about NetBeans 7.1, the JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview, the JDK 6 and JDK 7 installations on my CentOS Linux system, Java threads, the JDK 7 Fork/Join framework, closures... and probably a few more things were in there too. That kind of thing happens to me sometimes after a late night of programming or development-related brainstorming.

Now, if these dreams happen when I have looming deadline, I usually consider it a nightmare -- because I'll often "work" all night "solving" some problem that doesn't exist in my day world. But I'm hoping last night's dreams will ultimately prove to have been at least a little bit productive. There were plenty of curious ideas mixed in there. I'll find out if any of it's useful over the next several days...

Day work: JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview on Linux

It's daytime now, so I'll get down to some practical work. First, there's some good news for developers who want to try out JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview on Linux: Linux Release Notes and installation instructions are now available (that wasn't the case when I wrote my Getting Started (Very Preliminarily)... blog post a couple weeks ago). Also, the 2.1 Developer Preview is has advanced to build b11 (I originally downloaded build b9).

The instructions for JavaFX 2.1 on Linux identify the following system requirements:

• Ubuntu Linux 10.4 or higher (32 or 64 bit)
• JDK 6 update 26 or higher
• gtk2 2.18+
• libavcodec (for media)

I'm running CentOS 5.5, not Ubuntu; my current JDK 6 is prior to update 26; and rpm -q gtk2 tells me that I have gtk2 Version 2.10.4-20.el5. Not the perfect starting point... But, my guess is that likely I'll be able to get a proper configuration in place.

The latest GTK2 that's available via yum for CentOS 5.5 is still in the Version 2.10 sequence. So, I downloaded the last stable GTK2 (Version 2.24.9), and tried installing it. The result of ./configure was a bunch of missing dependencies (too old a version of GLib, and missing atk, pango, cairo, and gdk-pixbuf-2.0). Using yum to see what prepackaged versions of these are available for my CentOS system, I found that in all cases the available packages predate the required versions.

Stepping back to GTK+ 2.18 would help some, but still the dependencies could not be met by simply using the yum package manager.

So, it's a dilemma. I'd like to try out the JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview on my CentOS system, but there's a pretty big gulf between the CentOS 5.5 packages and what's required for JavaFX 2.1. Attempting big jumps in package versions can break a stable Linux system, in my experience. And the idea of upgrading to a newer operating system isn't all that appealing (that means downtime, and I do have development deadlines to meet). In addition, there are other things I'd like to be working on as well (such as experimenting with the performance differences between various strategies for efficiently utilizing multicore computers -- all that non-JavaFX stuff I was dreaming about last night).

I'll have to think about this for a while... Or, perhaps another night of Java-centric dreaming will provide a solution!

Java.net Weblogs

Since my last blog post, several people have posted new java.net blogs:

• Sonya Barry, Guest Post: Is Java the best language to meet my needs?;
• Brian O'Neill, Bundling Gems in Jars/Wars for Jruby;
• Otavio Santana, Persist document in Cassandra; and
• Karl Schaefer, SwingX 1.6.3 Released.

Poll

Our current java.net poll asks Under JCP 2.8, EC members lose their voting rights if they miss two consecutive meetings. Your view on this?. Voting will be open until Friday, February 17.

Articles

Our latest Java.net article is Michael Bar-Sinai's PanelMatic 101.

Java News

Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section:

• Michael Heinrichs demonstrates Creating read-only properties in JavaFX;
• Heather Van Cura reports JSR updates;
• Tori Wieldt announces Java Rock Stars 2011!;
• Alexandru Ersenie presents Glassfish - Vertical clustering with multiple domains;
• Hildeberto Mendonça discusses Choosing Between Vaadin and JSF;
• Jean-François Bonbhel announces Africa Android Challenge 2012;
• Alex Buckley announces JSR 308 Early Draft Review;
• Adam Bien presents Tomcat On Steroids (on Java EE 6) = TomEE--A Server Smoke Test;
• Roger Brinkley presents Java Spotlight Episode 67: Pascal Bleser on FOSDEM;
• Dustin Marx demonstrates JavaFX 2 Presents the Quadratic Formula;
• Bill B continues What's New In Java 7: Copy and Move Files and Directories;
• Adam Bien explains GlassFish / Jersey Exception "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: object is not an instance of declaring class" And Solution;
• Lincoln Baxter III demonstrates Server side action methods on JSF ValueChange events using AJAX listeners;
• Geertjan Wielenga reveals Hidden NetBeans Feature: Export Shortcuts to HTML;
• Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine reports More Java EE 7 - JSF 2.2;

Spotlights

Our latest java.net href="http://www.java.net/archive/spotlight">Spotlight is Heather Van Cura's JCP 2.8 Spec Lead Materials & Adopt-a-JSR update:

Following the upgrade to the JCP 2.8 Program, the Program Office has made available the following materials for Spec Leads on the Multimedia page of jcp.org: -Transparency (December 2011 call) -JCP 2.8 Overview (October 2011 call)...

Previously, we featured Jasper Potts' Curve fitting and styling AreaChart:

I was experimenting today with extending AreaChart to do curve fitting for some example code I was hacking on. It is also a example of what can be done with styling JavaFX charts with CSS. Here is the result...

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-- Kevin Farnham

Twitter: @kevin_farnham