Friday, December 5, 2008

JavaFX 1.0

I have just upgraded the JavaFX demo to work with the all new JavaFX 1.0 release. Alas only the Windows and Mac versions are available as of now, but thanks to this post I was able to get JavaFX 1.0 running on my Linux box.

As far as I can say, there have not been tremendous changes to the API from the pre-release to the final version. I had to adapt some import statements. Rectangle (and probably other shapes) moved from javafx.scene.geometry to javafx.scene.shape and the Font class move from javafx.scene to javafx.scene.text. The font style handling changed a bit, there is no FontStyle class anymore, but multiple boolean attributes on the Font object to control its style. The biggest change is probably that there is no javafx.application package anymore, the entry point of an JavaFX application is the javafx.stage.Stage class now.

On the tool side some compiler options changed or have been removed (-target does not exist anymore), and the applet parameter applicationclass has been renamed to MainJavaFXScript.

Check out the JavaFX homepage they have tons of examples there. Ohhh, and of course have a look at the updated GwtAI JavaFX demo and its source code.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

GwtAI - 0.2

I have made a second release of the GwtAI project. Besides some minor bug fixes it now contains a couple of new parameters:
  • The LoadingImage parameter sets a custom loading image for the applet. The custom image replaces the default animation that is show during applet loading.

  • The SeparateJVM parameter specifies that the applet should run in its own JVM instance (Java Plug-In >= 1.6.0_10 only).

  • The JavaArguments can be used to pass JVM command-line arguments to the applet instance (Java Plug-In >= 1.6.0_10 only).

  • The JavaVersion parameter specifies which JRE version is required to launch the applet (Java Plug-In >= 1.6.0_10 only).

In addition to the new functionality I have separated the core and demo code into two different Eclipse projects. That makes building GwtAI much easier.

Thanks to all the people who have sent me feedback and suggestions!!!

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Bringing JavaFX and GWT together

JavaFX it the new kid on the Java block. There is a lot of buzz about this new technology. Although it is not quite stable yet and some people think Sun is too late to win the RIA (Rich Internet Application) market. None the less I’m a Java guy, so I just had to have a look at JavaFX. At first I had some problems to understand how things work with JavaFX. They made quite some changes to the API over the course of developing it and lots of the examples on the net are not up to date anymore. This causes some confusion and does not make things easier.

However once I got my first JavaFX code snippet running the next question was how to integrate it into a GWT website. A JavaFX application can easily be compiled into a Java applet. And that is where GwtAI come into play. Have a look at this demo to learn how to integrate JavaFX with GWT. Using GwtAI this only takes a couple of lines of code, the actual compiling and packaging things together was a bit more complicated. The JavaFX support in Eclipse is not that great, and a real pain in the ass is the fact that the GWT compiler does not work with JDK 1.6 (at least not under 64bit Linux) and the JavaFX requires a Java 1.6 environment… Argh… But I figured it out eventually.



Don't miss the demo!

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Traceurl new functionality

Finally after months of promises I made an update of the Traceurl.com website. Now you can upload documents and trace accesses to this documents. The documents are stored in the very popular Box.net service. The new functionality is not yet finished and should be considered as beta. If you run into problems please let me know...

Friday, September 19, 2008

GwtAI - 0.1

Over the last weekend, I have finally made a first release of GwtAI. The project is still in an very early stage, but I got a couple of emails from people all over the world with questions and ideas. So I thought it is time to make something available for those who don't can or want to build GwtAI from SVN. The Applet integration and communication stuff is quite stable and already useful. The tray integration stuff does not yet work on all platforms. I have to read up and do some more tests with JDIC to get it to work on Linux and Mac.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Herbstcampus 2008

A couple of hours ago, I arrived in Nürnberg at the Herbstcampus Java conference. The conference is mixed with .Net guys so this promises to be interesting. I'll probably not gonna listen to a lot of .Net talks, still to get some impression from 'the other' (a almost said the 'dark') side may be enlightening. Tomorrow afternoon I am going to give my GWT talk again. Of course I had changed and improved it a bit. The talk is somewhat longer than the one from the Jazoon and I made a completely new demo application. I'll post the code and the presentation on my homepage later on...

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

GwtAI - GWT Applet Integration

In the past couple of days I have been working on a third party library to provide cross-browser no-hassle Java Applet integration for GWT. With the upcoming Java SE 6 Update 10 (a.ka. Update N) Sun provides a totally new browser plugin. With this move they want to bring the Java Applet and Web Start technology back. With the ability to drag an Applet outside of the browser and run it in a separate thread, Applets will become kind of equal to Web Start applications. The big advantage of an Applet that Applets are capable to talk back to the website that actually started them. So Applets may experience kind of comeback in the near future.

The GwtAI project is in an early stage, anyway have a look if you like.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Jazoon 2008 roundup

So the Jazoon 2008 is over and it was great fun. After my talk on the first conference day I relaxed and was enjoying the rest of the conference. In my book the presentations given by Joshua Bloch, Principal Engineer at Google, were the conference highlights. His presentation are not only informative but also entertaining. The opening sessions and keynotes are available as videos from Parleys, check them out yourself.

Most presentations, including mine, are already available for download from the Jazoon website.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Jazoon day 1 wrap-up

The first day at the Jazoon Conference is over. The Opening Sessions were really interesting. Martin Odersky started out with a talk on Scala which keeps to be the new thing to check out. Simon Phipps gave a really impressing talk on free software in the market, how to bring free software from niche to mainstream.

My own talk went quite well. I was less nervouse than I had expected, so it went like clockwork. Although I had quite a lot of slides I did not exceed the time limit. The slides will be available from the Jazoon homepage after the conference and I made the example sources avaliable from my private homepage.

A thrill of anticipation

I'm sitting in the Work Area at the Arena Flimcity where the Jazoon 2008 is going to take place. The Opening Session will start in about an hour. Web 2.0 technologies are quite a big topic here. Web developement, Ajax and all the frameworks around it get a lot of attention. There are three talks on GWT, one by myself :-)