This weekend I was playing with the JavaFX WebView to provide a first proof of concept for a map widget, a MapView. It was a good chance to get used to the properties and binding provided by JavaFX 2.0, as well as the skin pattern.
This MapView is still very primitive, but it looks promising.
More coming soon.
Today I kindof went back to the beginning of my free software ‘career’ and implemented a hyperbolic tree renderer for JavaFX:
This has been the thing that brought me to GNU Classpath, back then I made GNU Classpath able to render this in Swing/Java2D
This component is slightly improved, it can renderer arbitrary tree structures and instead of displaying colorful rectangles, it can basically display any shape, control, image or whatever you can come up with as JavaFX node.
This will be included in ThingsFX shortly. I will also make a live demo of this, because a screenshot doesn’t really convey how cool the component is (dragging the tree around with the mouse pointer is sooo much fun 😀 ).
Update: Here’s the live demo.
Last night Mario and me put together a demo of JFreeChart running inside JavaFX, as a Swing panel, using the Swing-JavaFX integration that we implemented for ThingsFX. I packaged this demo as a webstart applet/application for you to try out live. This should work at least on Windows. Unfortunately not on Linux since JavaFX has not yet been released for Linux (Go, Oracle, Go!) and I haven’t tried on MacOS. If the demo doesn’t work for you, you can still watch the screencast that Mario did below. Notice that this is not JFreeChart rendered to an image and added as ImageView, it’s a live Swing panel added inside JavaFX (I am sure there could be more impressive demos showing animations in the charts or such… material for another post I guess 😉 ). The source code for the demo can be found here.
Last weekend, Robert Branchat launched thingsfx.com. Together with Mario and my own nothingness, we want to build up an open source repository of amazing and useful extensions to JavaFX, like additional controls, animations, layouts, etc etc. Currently we are working on embedding Swing inside JavaFX scene. We also have some other extraordinary cool things in the pipeline and many many ideas for the future. Let’s roll! Watch out on this blog and here and here for more news.
ThingsFX just went live!
As Mario and Roman explain, we are building up an amazing framework on top of JavaFX, to take the max from its newly unveiled power.
Find out more at thingsfx.com.
Robert Branchat
Roman Kennke
thingsfx
ThingsFX 