Tuesday, December 15, was the third Tuesday in December. That means it was time for the monthly gath­ering of Chicago Java Users Group (JUG) mem­bers. Last Tuesday, the spot­light was on Sten Anderson.

Sten Anderson

Sten is a proud winner of the JavaFX Coding Challenge spon­sored by Sun Microsystems, for his Music Explorer FX rich Internet ap­pli­ca­tion (RIA). He is a big “Joel on Software” fan. Also, he blogs a lot about JavaFX and Groovy.

What Was Covered

At the CJUG meeting, Sten pre­sented a roundup of the state of JavaFX. After an overview of the un­der­lying par­a­digm of the new tech­nology, which out­paces Swing in most usage pa­ra­me­ters, he then in­tro­duced new fea­tures like data binding and Scala-​​like col­lec­tion tra­versing and se­quences. (BTW, Scala is be­coming more and more popular.)

Here is the gist of a state­ment made by Sten that out­lines JavaFX as a pure UI tech­nology: “JavaFX is for moving stuff on screen. If you want to con­nect to the data­base, JavaFX is not the thing for that.”

Sten de­scribed how JavaFX has a big bunch of con­trols. All of them are cus­tomiz­able with CSS. (So, old HTML coders can still use their knowl­edge.) Timelines allow doing an­i­ma­tion si­mul­ta­ne­ously or one-​​by-​​one. (Layers are the old Flash ap­proach to the or­ga­ni­za­tion of a scene.) He also cov­ered ef­fects like dis­trac­tion, gra­di­ents, and other en­hanced vector graphics that make the look-​​and-​​feel “glossy” and sat­isfy the 0.1-second er­gonomics rule.

In en­ter­prise ap­pli­ca­tions, the data and busi­ness rules usu­ally re­side on server. A lot of stuff is al­ready written in Seam and Spring. So, it’s log­ical to raise the ques­tion: How do you per­form the con­ver­sa­tion with server entry points? After a thor­ough yet simple ex­pla­na­tion of re­moting in JavaFX, Sten turned his at­ten­tion to Exadel Flamingo. He said he pre­ferred this li­brary to con­nect to the server and in­voke Seam and Spring MVC actions.

A Sidenote: Speaking about tools, every pro­fes­sional should have the best weapon to “shoot the problem down” in order to create some­thing amazing. Along these lines, I’d like to men­tion JavaFX Studio, the en­hanced code as­sis­tant for JavaFX script coding in the Eclipse IDE. The syntax high­lighting, au­to­com­plete fea­ture, click and nav­i­gate (OpenOn), error high­lighting, and state-​​of-​​the-​​art drag-​​and-​​drop GUI ed­itor make JavaFX Studio very helpful in de­vel­op­ment and debugging.

The pre­sen­ta­tion fin­ished with an overview of JavaFX “must have” books (Beginning JavaFX™ Platform and JavaFX in Action) fol­lowed by a Q&A. During the Q&A, one of the ques­tions was re­garding re­mote calls, and here Flamingo was brought up once again.

Conclusion

JavaFX is be­coming more and more pop­ular in the RIA world. From the tech­nology lead­er­ship point of view, it’s ev­i­dent that Exadel keeps a strong po­si­tion in JavaFX tech­nology by pro­viding us­able tools and solutions.

Links

Sten’s blog
A post about Sten’s achieve­ments
The award-​​winning JavaFX ap­pli­ca­tion
The Exadel JavaFX Studio Web page
The Exadel Flamingo Web page

Tags: Chicago, CJUG, Eclipse, Exadel Flamingo, Flamingo, JavaFX, JavaFX Studio, JBoss World, JUG, RIA, rich user interface, Sten Anderson