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Questions and Answers

What are you looking for in JavaFX demos?

Josh Marinacci, fresh from the launch of the JavaFX Preview SDK, wants to know what you're looking for in demos and samples. In JavaFX Bleg, he asks:

If you've downloaded the SDK already what would you like to build but don't know how to? If you haven't downloaded the SDK what sample would inspire you to try it out? If you've already started building an app, what problems you encountered? What could you use help with? Deployment? Media? Animation? Browser integration?

At the end of the day we are making this SDK so that you guys will build interesting applications. What samples can I build to help you do that?

To my way of thinking, there are two essential kinds of samples. One introduces an API or a technique and tries to keep things simple, to focus your attention on the coding techniques. Such a sample might not even have practical output; you're intended to study the code at a fairly low level. The other kind of sample, something we see a lot of at JavaOne, is the ambitious demo that shows what kinds of things are possible with a given technology. With these, the point might not be to study the code, per se, but to be assured that the technology provides a suitably impressive amount of power, encouraging you to do the same.

Of course, the gotcha in the latter case is that the people writing the demos are often the developers of the technology in question, and know it inside and out. If I remember correctly, it was the realization that it took three of the best Swing engineers a couple weeks (or months?) to create Aerith that provided part of the justification for doing JavaFX in the first place: creating great GUIs shouldn't be that hard.

So count my vote for more small and simple "technique" samples, and less of the grandiose "see what you can do (if you're us)" demos. Of course, your mileage may vary. Josh already has a number of requests in the comments to his blog, and you're welcome to add your own.

Also in today's Weblogs, we find Tim Boudreau thinking about API Blogs. "One thing which I think about often is the design of code, software libraries and APIs. I've been working on deriving some principles from the things I do intuitively based on experience. Whether those are useful to anyone else is an open question. Peer review is the best tool for figuring out if these really make sense or not, so I'd appreciate feedback on my next few blogs - hopefully one day they can make up some articles or a book or similar."

Finally, Carol McDonald presents a RESTful Pet Catalog. "This Sample Pet Store Catalog application shows how to expose a Catalog as a RESTful Web Service for remote client applications, and it shows how to code a Dojo client which gets and displays the Web Service responses in a dynamic Ajax table ( Dojo grid)"

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is j1-2k8-mtH03: A Mobile Interface for Data Mash-Up by Parth Vohra. In this brief "fill-in" mini-talk, Parth shows off a mobile approach for data mashups, using OpenESB and the Mural project.

In Java Today, Kirill Grouchnikov notes an unanticipated benefit of launching the LightBeam project to test performance of Swing L&F's. In Using LightBeam to measure XRender performance, he writes, "an unexpected and welcome usage of LightBeam comes from the XRender Pipeline project that aims to create a new Java2D rendering pipeline based upong the X11 XRender extension. This project is part of OpenJDK Community Innovators’ Challenge that has reached the submission deadline yesterday, and is lead by Clemens Eisserer. The benchmark page of XRender project uses two third-party open-source benchmarking suites - MigLayout swing benchmark and LightBeam."

Sun's Sun Java Real-Time System 2.1, a commercial implementation of the Real-Time Java Specification for Java, has just been released. Danny Coward blogs about the release, and Java RTS in general, in Want your Java fast or predictable? Java RTS 2.1 is here. "This implementation is at the other end of the predictability versus speed continuum, where your application may select tasks (zero to all of them) as tasks that must complete within a given time period. There is no 'better late than never' here: late equals failure for this implementation of Java SE."

In a new NetBeans.tv screencast, Nandini Ramani Introduces the JavaFX Preview SDK, Engineering Director Nandini Ramani introduces JavaFX Preview SDK and shows how to use NetBeans IDE 6.1 With JavaFX to run samples and create an application.

In today's Forums, a thread in the Blu-Ray Java forum notes new options for getting licensed to develop BD-J applications, and in Re: [BD-J-DEV] BD-J JavaDocStubs, billf corrects an early mis-statement about stub availability. "Oops! It turns out my information source was wrong - the source to the org.bluray stubs has, in fact, been published. This is Very Good News. One caution to folks downloading them: Don't be distracted by the big yellow file folder icon into thinking that this is the only thing on the download page. Look further down the page to the blue word "Download" under the blue heading that says "download" When some of the non-BDA parts are available in a more convenient form, I'll write up a Wiki article on how to assemble the pieces, and I'll post an announcement here."

Sebastian Gomez would like help setting up Multiple WSDLs using Maven Plugin (wsimport). "Up until now, I've been using the wsimport goal to generate Java code from a WSDL. Now I've decided to break the WSDL into two, but I can't find the way to make it work using the plugin. First I tried listing both files in the wsdlFiles tag, but it didn't work. After that I've read about using multiple executions for the plugin, but it only executes the first one listed in the pom. I've tried a few more things, but always without success. I'm out of ideas now, and I guess someone else must have had to come up with this issue, and luckily already found some solution to it."

Finally, saeven asks about Using a JTable in JavaFX App. "I'd like to place a data table in a JavaFX app as exercise, but cannot seem to find how this is done. There's so much "beta" documentation out there, or posts containing code that doesn't work, that it has become a bit confusing. I'm also scanning the javafx API, and can't seem to find anything to do with a javafx table. So.. Simple example on how to embed a JTable into a SwingFrame anywhere?"

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Comments

• Something that's often overlooked when talking about Aerith's development time vs JavaFX is that we wrote the Animated Transitions library, parts of the TimingFramework library, parts of the Fuse library, parts of SwingX (JXMapViewer in particular) amd fixed/added stuff in JOGL. Designing new APIs correctly does not come cheap and after we were done it was much easier for any Java developer to write the same kind of UI quite quickly.

  Posted by: gfx on August 06, 2008 at 04:29 PM

• Bingo gfx! You have just described what JavaFX is all about: Just replace in your sentence "any Java developer" with "any developer", and voila! that's JavaFX for you.

  Posted by: mikeazzi on August 06, 2008 at 04:51 PM

• I still don't "get" JavaFX. To me it's like Sun botched another Java related release. Who is it aimed at? Certainly not me as a normal Java developer - the syntax is new and requires learning, and for what? So I can supposedly create GUI's faster? No thanks, I'll use a tool like Netbeans where more of the work is done for me.
  Is it aimed then at trying to resurrect Applets? Good luck. The secret of Flash isn't just that it is installed everywhere - it's the tools! So far, a year after JavaFX came out, there are still no real tools. Netbeans doesn't count because it doesn't have anything "special" for JavaFX (and it just recently received a plugin to work with JavaFX!) Flash developers have a myriad of tools to help them.

  Sun should have actually sat down with the target audience and asked how JavaFX should be. Instead it seems like they took a few Swing developers and asked how they could have their job made easier...and then only listened to half of what they said.

  Posted by: hexghost on August 06, 2008 at 05:38 PM

• mikeazzi: My point is that JavaFX is not that much better compared to what could have been done with the existing Java SE and a few additional libraries. The Java FX Script language contains some niceties but the productivity boost lies in the libraries that come with it... and that could very well be used with Java.

  Posted by: gfx on August 07, 2008 at 01:23 AM

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