Are you going to be in London on the 24th of November? If so, be sure to see the Eclipse Demo Camp which will be showing the latest JavaFX support for Eclipse, in addition to other new Eclipse features.

Attendance is free but you must register with SkillsMatter. Details are on the page. The new Eclipse support for JavaFX is starting to look pretty nice.

While developing JavaFX applications, I always feel the great potential of transformational effects.

At the same time, I wonder how they actually work and why we need several classes and variables to perform the same transformation.

Share my experience of studying the essentials of transformations in the new technical article Enhance Your Application by Applying Transformations.

With the code samples provided in this article, you can learn how to employ transformations in your applications and combine them with animation.

Alla Redko
Technical Writer
JavaFX Docs & Training

One of our latest articles shows how to program an image slideshow in JavaFX. Users can learn this material in two different ways: by reading the article text itself, or by watching a video screencast.

We're considering adding more screencasts to future articles, but would like to first collect opinions from you, our readers.

Questions:

1. Do you find screencasts useful, and if so, why?
2. Do you find it easier to learn by reading a written tutorial, or by watching a video screencast?
3. Would you prefer that we produce more tutorials (and less screencasts), or more screencasts (and less tutorials)?

By taking just a minute to answer these questions, you will greatly help to improve our documentation.

Thank you,

Scott Hommel
Technical Writer
JavaFX Docs & Training

When you're developing a JavaFX application, how many times do you get to a point in the code and say to yourself "How do I do that?" and then you have to go searching for the answer. We writers found we were asking that question a lot. So we developed a set of how-to topics. Check 'em out:

http://javafx.com/learn/howto.jsp

The main categories are organized in the order in which you'd develop an application from start to finish. Some topics contain a number of subtopics. For example, the topic How do I work with shapes? contains separate topics on creating a variety of different shapes.

Whenever possible, topics include basic code that you can copy and paste into your application. Topics also contain links to other articles, samples, blogs, and videos that have more information on the topic.

There's space at the bottom of each topic for feedback. Let us know how you like this new feature, and if you can't find the answer to a question, be sure to make a note of it!

Josh Marinacci has just launched a new open source tool for creating interactive art, written entirely in JavaFX. See the launch page for the full description.

Want to make an image slideshow for use on your website? Find out how, with our latest tutorial and screencast from technical writer Scott Hommel. With these instructions, you'll walk through the end-to-end development of an image slideshow application, complete with animated fade transitions. The discussion is presented as six concrete steps, with each step building on the last. Get to the fun stuff with minimal effort by copying and pasting the source code, or just watch the video screencast to see it all developed with NetBeans IDE. 

Site Updates:

• We have added a entire section on the website listing our partners : check out - javafx.com/partners 

 What's New on javafx.com learn:

• A screencast by Scott Hommel - Creating an Image Slideshow
• and as you may have read in an earlier blog post, we have updated the Tech Test Train Training app

Here are some recent blogs and articles about JavaFX :

• Simon Morris author of JavaFX in Action  is writing  a multi-part blog called The Bluffers Guide to JavaFX in the Inside RIA blog.
• Read about Programming bitmapped graphics with JavaFX on java.net 
• A Scala console written in JavaFX
• A book review of Essential JavaFX
• A multi-part blog on Creating a Simple Game in JavaFX 
• Peter Pilgrim makes an introduction to the Java FX platform in - Enterprise Java FX for the Web Platform
• A recording 

  Max Katz's webinar titled "Build RIA with JavaFX, Flamingo and Seam

• Lightroom statistics - A JavaFX utlility for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users

• Cheqlist a JavaFX desktop to-do application based on the Remember The Milk developer API

• Weekly links from Jonathan Giles

 Here are a couple of links to JavaFX apps that were left as comments in the previous round up post: 

• Aljoscha Rittner has written a small presentation app that shows the features of JavaFX. (click link to go to the open source project) 
• Alex Gnodtke has written a tutorial to take a simple JavaSE  game and convert it to JavaFX [also mentioned above]

 In News related to contests: 

• Jim Weaver has announced the JavaFXpert RIA Exemplar Challenge  : Deadline - Jan 2010

"Create an application in JavaFX that exemplifies the appearance and behavior of a next-generation enterprise RIA (rich internet application)"

• Thje next jfxstudio challenge - (theme : five) is now closed. You can visit the site to see some of the submissions, learn about the results or learn about the next contest theme.

You can also read about, and see the code for Jasper Potts submission to an earlier contest : the radial clock - at the FXperience blog 

Events:

The initial launch meeting of the Silicon Valley Java Users Group is scheduled for the 9th of December. Richard Bair, JavaFX lead developer will be presenting 

Releases: 

• A new version of WidgetFX, which includes some new functionality, including a new slideshow widget and support for 64-bit systems has been released

As you may know, we've had a mobile emulator built into the JavaFX SDK since our 1.1 release back in February, but only if you were using Windows as your development platform.  Well, if you are one of the many JavaFX developers that uses a Mac as their primary development machine, we have a couple of solutions for you.

The first option is to get a Windows Mobile-based device and install our JavaFX Mobile runtime.  This runtime has been tested on the HTC Diamond and the LG Incite, but should work on a wide variety of Windows Mobile 6.1 or 6.5 devices.  Once you have the runtime installed, you should be able to build and deploy apps directly to this device from within Netbeans.  If you would like to learn more about how to use this runtime, check out this blog entry by Terrence Barr.

And now, I'm excited to let you know that we've just released an Early Access build of the Java ME SDK for Mac OS X.  With this release, you can build your mobile apps in Netbeans and then run them in an emulator using the Java ME SDK, directly on your desktop!  (Note: we'll integrate this better in the future, but for now you can build your apps in NetBeans and then open them in the Java ME SDK, a relatively simple two step process).  Go download a copy, give it a try, and let us know what you think! 

We've updated the Tech Test Train. The new version features cumulative scoring and improved performance. The final score of a completed Route carries over to the next Route. A perfect game score is 27,000 points. Will you be one of the first to join the 30³ club? Try this new version and post your score in the comments section of the JavaFX Training page.

If you're attending Oracle OpenWorld this week, we'd love you to come by and see what we've been up to!  We've been very busy preparing for this event and are excited to show you everything we've been working on.  First up on the agenda, Sun's SVP for Client Software, Jeet Kaul, will be giving a talk entitled "Relentless Innovation in Java" at 11:30AM on Monday at the Marriott (Salon 4).  He's promised he'll spend about 50% of the time on demos so it should be a fun and engaging session and you may even see a couple of unreleased product previews.  Don't miss out!

The Java team has a number of other sessions they'll be giving throughout the week, and will also be exhibiting at both Moscone South and the Hilton (Oracle Develop).  For more details on these and other activities, please click here. 

Here are some of the interesting blogs and articles about JavaFX published in the last couple of weeks:

• Ten Interesting Aspects of JavaFX Script

• CJTech - JavaFX Production Suite Screencast  and  JavaFX Production Suite 1.2

•  Amy Fowler's Blog - JavaFX1.2: Understanding Bounds

• Martin Matula's Blog - JavaFX Password Field

• Mark Macumber: JavaFX and RSS

• JavaFX Location and GPS

• SW Seminar: JavaFX - Serving the next Billion

• New on SDN: Applying Custom Fonts

• The Java Posse : What do we want from JavaFX

• Also see: Reviews Interactive - here is a list of Recent JavaFX How-To's and Review Articles

Continuing our collaboration with San Jose State University (SJSU), this week we would like to highlight a project developed by Steven Le who is a 4th year under graduate student pursuing BS in Software Engineering at SJSU. This project was developed under the guidance of Dr. Jerry Gao who is a professor at SJSU and was developed in a span of three days. This goes to show that even students with no prior knowledge of the JavaFX language or design experience could pick up JavaFX and create something really simple and usable. The project being highlighted is a typical Calendar Book with ability to flip pages, add pre-loaded icons for various events such as birthday, meeting, dinner etc, and Inline text editing to add a new appointment. 

• Try the Application
• Source Code ( You can download this and build it using NetBeans) 

 

More about  Steven Le - in his own words :

I'm in my 4th year at SJSU pursuing a BS in Software Engineering. My interests include learning about new technologies, especially in mobile and web development. On the side, I like to mess around with digital design and multimedia type things. Outside of computers, I can enjoy the more active outdoor activities like scuba, water sports, camping, hiking, and sky diving, but most of the time, I'm playing regular sports like basketball and tennis. Basically, I'm just into trying new things.

Two of our JavaFX tutorials are now available in Russian on developers.sun.ru:

• Learning the JavaFX Script Programming Language
• Building GUI Applications With JavaFX

If you're working as a designer on RIAs and exporting graphics to JavaFX with Production Suite, it's very helpful to know the features in your graphics tool that are supported for export.

The lists of supported features for Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and SVG format have been available in the Production Suite online help, which is installed with the product, but now they are available on javafx.com, too.

• Supported Features for Conversion From Adobe Illustrator to JavaFX
• Supported Features for Conversion From Adobe Photoshop to JavaFX
• Supported Features for Conversion From SVG to JavaFX

Learn how to easily improve the visual appearance of your JavaFX applications with two new docs added to the Layouts, Effects, Themes section of our main Reference page.

Have you ever tried to make a shift in rendering textual content by applying a custom font? Read Using Custom Fonts in Your JavaFX Application, a technical tip provided by Dmitry Kostovarov. This tech tip describes how to make the text look just the way you want on any computer.

Benefit from different layout approaches discussed in Using Layout Containers by Inyoung Cho and Alla Redko. Play with the Flower Viewer demo to learn more about layout containers and choose the most appropriate model to arrange pictures in your application.