Scenic View has been somewhat neglected recently as my focus has been on my day job (it’s keeping me rather busy), and on building out ControlsFX. My hope is to find time to bring Scenic View back up on JavaFX 8.0, but I’m relying on feedback from users about what is and is not working. If anyone has time to seriously contribute to development of Scenic View, I am also happy to work with you on it.

The Scenic View download is in its usual place, and because I get given grief if I don’t say what Scenic View is, here is the executive summary: Scenic View is a JavaFX application designed to make it simple to understand the current state of your application scenegraph, and to also easily manipulate properties of the scenegraph without having to keep editing your code. This lets you find bugs, and get things pixel perfect without having to do the compile-check-compile dance.

Thanks!

• Probably the biggest news of the past week was that Niklas Therning has managed to get JavaFX running on iOS devices by combining OpenJFX with Apache Harmony and RoboVM.
• Tom Schindl has made available builds of Eclipse that work with Java 8, which is really useful for anyone developing JavaFX now that it has switched to depending on some Java 8 features and API. I intend to switch back to Eclipse ASAP.
• Gerrit Grunwald has once again updated his validation UI feedback API, improving it to not draw validation feedback for invisible fields.
• Speaking of Gerrit, he has also posted a new (JavaFX 2.x) toggle button control.
• Danno Ferrin has released version 0.3.0 of the JavaFX Gradle Plugin. As he says in the post, “new in this release is the ability to specify a particular JVM to package with your native bundles and the ability to customize platform-specific build options. Some configuration options and conventions also moved around to support these two features, most notably the plugin no longer automatically self-signs the code.”
• Hendrik Ebbers has posted part two of his series on ‘designing JavaFX business applications‘. This post discusses the limitations of FXML, and makes a proposal on how to improve this.
• Sean Phillips has been working on a ‘JavaFX Accordion slide-out menu for the NetBeans Platform‘.
• The Canoo blog has a post on AfterburnerDolphin, which is (rather obviously) a combination of the AfterBurner.fx project by Adam Bien and the OpenDolphin project by Canoo.
• Granite Data Services 3.0.0.M2 is out and available for download here, and you can read the announcement on their website.
• Robert Ladstätter has posted on 2D Image Filters with OpenCV and JavaFX.
• Asko K has put up a small code snippet to test out JavaFX 3D features (in his case specifically on Mac OS X).

That’s all this week. Catch you again next week!

• Hendrik Ebbers has two posts this week. Firstly, he talks about the ‘aquatecture‘ of the AquaFX project (which is a project to create a Mac OS X look for JavaFX). Secondly, he has the first post in a series about designing JavaFX business applications. This post focuses on the JavaFX middleware layer, and in particular he calls out DataFX, RedFX and OpenDolphin. Future posts will cover the client side and other areas.
• Angela Caicedo, a Java evangelist at Oracle, was interviewed at Devoxx UK about her work on user interface development using Raspberry PI and JavaFX.
• Jim Laskey has blogged about writing JavaFX applications in JavaScript (on top of Nashorn).
• I announced the availability of a new project called ControlsFX, which not surprisingly is a collection of JavaFX UI controls (dialogs, button bars, grid views, etc) designed for JavaFX 8.0 and above.
• Gerrit Grunwald has announced a JavaFX BBQ at his place in June. If you’re in the area, he’s got all the details on his blog.
• Sri kalyan posted a blog post on his FXTalk project, which is a JavaFX-based gtalk / Jabber client.
• Carl Dea has posted the code for his WebcamFX project to GitHub.

That’s all folks! Catch you again next week after I return from the US.

This has been a long-running project that has recently gained steam thanks to a number of contributors helping out. Over time I’ll call them out in more detail (and perhaps with interviews), but today the main people I’d like to thank are Eugene Ryzhikov, Hendrik Ebbers, and Danno Ferrin.

To conclude this post, I’m copy/pasting the new features documentation from the ControlsFX page into the remainder of this blog post.

Features

ButtonBar
A horizontal container for buttons, which automatically places the buttons in the correct position for the underlying operating system. Just annotate the buttons with their type and it’ll handle the rest!

Dialogs
A collection of pre-built, modal dialogs providing a really simple yet powerful API. Supports all manner of pre-built dialogs, and even allows for custom dialogs to be easily created.

GridView
A fast, virtualised grid container similar to ListView, except that there can be multiple cells on each row. Great for showing images!

RangeSlider
When you want a user to specify a range, right now you need to give them two text fields to type into (or two sliders). Yuck! This control is essentially the standard JavaFX slider but with two draggable thumbs on it – one representing the low value and the other the high value. Much better!

Rating
A simple control that allows users to specify a rating between zero and a maximum value. This control supports partial ratings and updating on hover or on click.

SegmentedButton
When you have a ToggleGroup with buttons in it, it looks nicer when the buttons are grouped together (rather than individual buttons). This is exactly what the SegmentedButton control does – it ‘merges’ together all of your buttons in a ToggleGroup so that it is clear to users that the buttons are related.

• JavaFX 8.0 b88 is available for download, which includes the normal bug fixes, etc, but also JavaFX 3D support on Mac and Linux (it actually appeared in b87, I just forgot to mention it).
• Also newly released this week in Scene Builder 1.1 b25.
• Danno Ferrin has blogged about his touch / gesture test application Touchy FXy. As he says in the post, “One of the main reasons I wrote this is to get a feel for some of the quirks on the various platforms that JavaFX runs on. Already I have some issues in mind, but I want to get a good survey of the problem space before I propose anything.”
• Philipp Dörfler has a guest post over at guigarage about his sbt-fxml project. sbt-fxml is, as Philipp puts it, a tool that “scans for FXML files – either hand written or created by Scene Builder – parses them and creates controller classes with a proper name, package structure, imports, declarations and types. That’s right: types! So now your FXML files suddenly type check thus allowing you to find mistakes almost instantly. And because of SBT, you don’t even have to manually start the build for it. It happens as soon as you save your files.”
• Jasper Potts has posted a video and some code demonstrating how he hacked together support for the 3D SpaceNavigator input device.
• Speaking of Jasper and 3D, he has made available the code to render 3D models from various apps. You can get it by cloning the openjfx mercurial repo and browsing into rt/apps/experiments/3DViewer. He tweeted a screenshot of the application.
• Angela Caicedo has a long and detailed post called “Beyond Beauty: JavaFX, I2C, Parallax, Touch, Raspberry Pi, Gyroscopes and Much More.”
• mihosoft has published part two of the series of posts on workflow visualization with VWorkflows & JavaFX.
• Sean Phillips has posted part two of how to integrate JavaFX into the NetBeans platform wizard.
• Jason Lee has started to develop an AsciiDoc editor in JavaFX. You can check out the project over at bitbucket.
• Andy Moncsek has a post about using JacpFX clients with JSR 356 WebSockets.
• Jim Weaver and Thierry Wasylczenko were interviewed at Devoxx France, and the video is now available online for you to view.
• Robert Ladstätter has two posts this week. Firstly, he has posted part three on how to “use your webcam with JavaFX and OpenCV“. Secondly, he has a post on “using Scala Futures and OpenCV together with JavaFX“.
• Froglogic Squish (a commercial tool for UI test automation) has received an update that now adds support for JavaFX UI testing. I should note I’ve not used or even had access to this tool, but I am pleased that UI test automation is being worked on for JavaFX, hence the mention.

See – I told you it was a great list of links! Catch you all next week, and keep up the great work.

Andy Moncsek

SpaceNavigator with JavaFX from Jasper Potts on Vimeo.

The code really is very simple, I just have a AnimationTimer that every frame checks to get the current inputs from device and applies them to the camera transforms. The device via jinput provides 6 floats for each axis and 2 booleans for the buttons, so could not be easier to connect to your app. Below is complete 3D app with a simple cube. I will be working on getting the object importers out in open source for you to use very soon

public class InputTestBlog extends Application {
    private ControllerEnvironment controllerEnvironment;
    private Controller spaceNavigator;
    private Component[] components;
    private Translate translate;
    private Rotate rotateX,rotateY,rotateZ;

    @Override public void start(Stage stage) throws Exception {
        controllerEnvironment = ControllerEnvironment.getDefaultEnvironment();
        Controller[] controllers = controllerEnvironment.getControllers();
        for(Controller controller: controllers){
            if ("SpaceNavigator".equalsIgnoreCase(controller.getName())){
                spaceNavigator = controller;
                System.out.println("USING Device ["+controller.getName()+"] of type ["+controller.getType().toString()+"]");
                components = spaceNavigator.getComponents();
            }
        }

        Group root = new Group();
        Scene scene = new Scene(root, 1024, 768, true);
        stage.setScene(scene);
        scene.setFill(Color.GRAY);
        // CAMERA
        final PerspectiveCamera camera = new PerspectiveCamera(true);
        scene.setCamera(camera);
        root.getChildren().add(camera);
        // BOX
        Box testBox = new Box(5,5,5);
        testBox.setMaterial(new PhongMaterial(Color.RED));
        testBox.setDrawMode(DrawMode.LINE);
        root.getChildren().add(testBox);
        // MOVE CAMERA
        camera.getTransforms().addAll(
                rotateY = new Rotate(-20, Rotate.Y_AXIS),
                rotateX = new Rotate(-20, Rotate.X_AXIS),
                rotateZ = new Rotate(0, Rotate.Z_AXIS),
                translate = new Translate(5, -5, -15)
        );
        // SHOW STAGE
        stage.show();
        // CHECK FOR INPUT
        if (spaceNavigator != null) {
            new AnimationTimer() {
                @Override public void handle(long l) {
                    if (spaceNavigator.poll()) {
                        for(Component component: components) {
                            switch(component.getName()) {
                                case "x":
                                    translate.setX(translate.getX() + component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "y":
                                    translate.setY(translate.getY()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "z":
                                    translate.setZ(translate.getZ()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "rx":
                                    rotateX.setAngle(rotateX.getAngle()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "ry":
                                    rotateY.setAngle(rotateY.getAngle()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                                case "rz":
                                    rotateZ.setAngle(rotateZ.getAngle()+component.getPollData());
                                    break;
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }.start();
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.setProperty("net.java.games.input.librarypath", new File("lib").getAbsolutePath());
        launch(args);
    }
}

• Coming up this week is a presentation by Richard Bair at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group on the topic of OpenJFX. The talk is on Wednesday, 1st May, starting at 6:15pm (PDT). As per usual, it will also be broadcast live over the internet for those of you not in the Bay Area (such as myself). The streaming starts at 7:00pm, and I recommend you sign up for a ustream account so that you may join the discussion. The stream is at the usual place.
• Canoo have two recent blog posts that may be of interest to you. Firstly, they have posted on using Dolphin to display a train station schedule. In a second post, they cover their CanooNow project, which is an embedded room allocation dashboard with JavaFx and OpenDolphin, running on a Raspberry Pi.
• Claudine Zillmann continues making excellent progress on developing a Mac OS X aqua theme for JavaFX. She has just posted another blog post which shows a JavaFX application side-by-side with a native Mac OS X dialog, and the differences are negligible.
• There appears to be a battle being waged between Sean Phillips and Geertjan Wielenga over JavaFX integration into the NetBeans platform. There are now five such articles that I’m aware of, all titled along the lines of “How to Integrate JavaFX into the NetBeans Platform X”, where X has so far included Visual Library Scene, MenuBar, ToolBar, Wizard, and Explorer View. Keep up the great work guys – lets see how far you can push NetBeans
• The Helsinki Scala Club recently had a presentation on ScalaFX, which is now posted online (in PDF form).
• Mirko Sertic has created a desktop search engine with a JavaFX frontend. Very nice stuff!
• August Lammersdorf has updated his JavaFX 3D model importers to take advantage of the new JavaFX 3D APIs that appeared in JavaFX 8.0 b87.
• William Antonio has posted a blog detailing the Afterburner.fx library developed by Adam Bien. Afterburner.fx is a “minimalistic (2 classes) JavaFX MVP framework based on Convention over Configuration.”
• Jörn Hameister has blogged about how to use and extend the JFXtras library.
• Robin Leo Söderström has a post about creating a Windows 7 screen saver using JavaFX.
• Anton Epple has a short post on how to dynamically populate a JavaFX tooltip just prior to displaying it on screen.

That’s all for this week, and again, keep up the great work folks!

• Richard Bair mentioned this week that the rest of the JavaFX iOS / Android source code is going to be open sourced this week. Note that this is not a complete implementation – there is still a lot of work left for the community to do!
• Jarek Sacha has announced the release of ScalaFX 1.0 milestone 3. ScalaFX helps you simplify creation of JavaFX-based user interfaces in Scala. ScalaFX uses a simple, hierarchical pattern for creating new objects and building up the scene graph. ScalaFX supports full interoperability with Java and can run anywhere the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and JavaFX2 are supported. Current version supports most of the JavaFX 2.2.7 functionality. For more information see ScalaFX home page.
• The JavaFX documentation site now has an article on how to use Scene Builder from NetBeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.
• Gerrit Grunwald has blogged about how he explored showing form validation results using a glasspane-like approach of overlaying images above the UI.
• Carl Dea has posted a case study on a JavaFX Widget Framework API that he is developing. This first post covers the theory, but he plans to post more in the coming weeks to cover the technical aspects.
• Jens Deters has posted part two of his JavaFX on Raspberry Pi series, this week focusing on the code required to control things via the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins.
• Florian Brunner has blogged about how he is open sourcing his work on ‘Drombler Commons’, which is a collection of utility classes and JavaFX controls for the new Date & Time API (JSR-310).
• Arnaud Nouard has posted about his new project called iBreed, which is a hybrid application framework for JavaFX/HTML.
• Danno Ferrin has started Touchy FXy, a project to demonstrate the touch and gesture APIs in JavaFX.
• mihosoft have blogged about workflow visualization With VWorkflows & JavaFX.

Catch you all next week. In the mean time, keep up the great work folks!

• Adam Bien has posted a YouTube video on ‘Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and Convention over Configuration …with JavaFX 8‘.
• Robin Leo Söderström has posted a four-post series covering the development of an app he calls FXComparer, which is an open source application for comparing archives.
• Robert Ladstätter has two posts this week, both related to image processing in JavaFX. Firstly, he has posted on ‘using your webcam with JavaFX and openCV‘, and secondly he has a post titled ‘image processing with OpenCV and JavaFX‘.
• Jim Kay has made available his source code for his JavaFX 3D support (in JavaFX 2.0, not 8.0 – where there is built in support for 3D).
• Speaking of JavaFX 3D (and this time the JavaFX 8.0 kind), mihosoft have a blog post showing off JavaFX 3D inside their window control.
• FXForm2-0.21 has been released. FXForm2 is a form generator for JavaFX that generates forms based on the provided bean.
• Jens Deters has a blog detailing how he uses JavaFX on a Raspberry Pi to control LED lights via the CPIO-out pins.

Catch you all in a weeks time!

April 1 – April 8:

• JDK 8 Early Access Developer Preview b84 has been released, which of course includes the latest JavaFX 8.0 developer preview build.
• JetBrains have announced that IntelliJ IDEA 12.1 is now available, and it comes with great JavaFX 2.x support, including “complete support for FXML markup, custom CSS, code completion, navigation and search, refactorings, packaging tools, and integration with SceneBuilder.” This means that the three main Java IDEs (IntelliJ, Eclipse and NetBeans) all have great support for JavaFX. Personally I’ve moved back to using Eclipse (which I used for many years), and it is a joy to return to my ‘home’ IDE.
• Philipp Dörfler has been working on a project he calls sbt-fxml, which generates Scala-based controller classes for a given FXML file. I’m not a huge user of FXML, but I wonder if similar tooling could be developed for Java and other language controllers?
• Jim Laskey has a blog post exploring how to use Java FX from Nashorn (the Java-based JavaScript engine coming up in Java 8).
• Sébastien Bordes has announced the release of JRebirth 0.7.3. From the JRebirth website: “JRebirth JavaFX 2 Application Framework provides a really simple way to write sophisticated and powerful RIA’s applications. By leveraging the best of previous RIA framework, we can deliver the ultimate one to work cleanly and efficiently with this awesome API”.
• Speaking of JavaFX application frameworks, Adam Bien has been working on Afterburner.fx, a “minimalistic (2 classes) JavaFX MVP framework based on Convention over Configuration.”
• Jens Deters has updated his SelectableTitledPane blog post I linked to last week.
• Jens Deters has updated his earlier JavaFX on Raspberry Pi script to be even better.
• Jorn Hameister has posted another JavaFX fractal application, this time the Mandelbrot and Julia fractals.
• Paul Leahy has posted a few articles over on about.com about JavaFX UI controls, covering Label, Button, TextField and ChoiceBox.

March 25 – April 1:

• Richard Bair has been working like a mad man improving the build infrastructure of OpenJFX by using gradle. As his work proceeds he has been writing considerable documentation for those interested.
• Much discussion took place this week on Twitter due to the introduction of the SwingNode code into the OpenJFX repo. The SwingNode allows for Swing to be embedded within a JavaFX scenegraph (so in JavaFX 8.0 it is possible to embed JavaFX inside Swing and SWT, and Swing can be embedded inside JavaFX).
• JetBrains have posted part three of their series on IntelliJ support for JavaFX 2, this time blogging about packaging JavaFX 2 applications in IntelliJ IDEA 12.1.
• Johan Vos has an article up on jaxenter about ‘getting real world data into JavaFX UI controls with DataFX‘. More information about DataFX can be found over at the DataFX website.
• Sven Reimers has begun a series of posts on  his eFX application framework for JavaFX.
• Dierk Koenig has posted a video showing a Swing to JavaFX migration using the OpenDolphin framework.
• mihosoft have posted about how JavaFX 8.0 has seen large performance gains over JavaFX 2.x (which is something we’ve been working hard on in the 8.x development cycle).
• Sven Efftinge has put up a readme detailing the functionality offered by the xtendfx library. As he puts it, “XtendFX is a little library making JavaFX programming in Java and Xtend a joy.” It certainly does look very nice.
• Robert Ladstätter continues to work on JavaFX graphics, this time he has a video where he draws a 3D tree (yes, literally a tree)
• Jens Deters has blogged about a custom JavaFX component he has developed: a SelectablePane (essentially a TitledPane with some modifications to control its expanded state).

Catch you all next week!