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Monday Aug 31, 2009

End-to-End Example of JavaFX Multi-user Online Application

JavaFX is an important client side technology. The term "RIA" contains two essential things: 'R' for "Rich" and 'I' for "Internet". This means a typical JavaFX application has a rich client and can utilize internet resources. To fully demostrate how a complete JavaFX application is built, I created a demo program. It is called 'Wish Tree' which allows people to share wishes on a tree. Every wish is denoted by a colorful lucky star hanging on the tree. To make an online wish, just click on anywhere on the tree and enter your wish. People can click on an exsiting star to view the wish. The wisher can update his/her wish as well. If multiple users are running the application, they see the same tree and wishes(stars). You can click on the below screenshot to start the demo application:

The architecture of this application is delineated in the below figure. At first, the JavaFX client gets launched from a browser by Java Web Start technology. Then the client connects to the web server to get the data and draws the wish tree hanging with all the stars. The server PHP component gets data from the database and returns to the client. If a user makes a wish on the client, the data of the wish is sent to the server for persistence.

It is quite interesting to see there were already more than 30 people leaving their wishes on the tree since I released the application. If you are intersted in details of this demo, please visit the following articles:

JavaFX Multi-user Application Demo: Wish Tree Part 1
JavaFX Multi-user Application Demo: Wish Tree Part 2

Posted at 09:51PM Aug 31, 2009 by morningstar in JavaFX |