SAN Adventures

Key New Features in JavaFX 1.2 SDK

There are a lot of new features added in the JavaFX 1.2 SDK which also includes few changes in the existing packages, changes in the API, changes in the variable names and so on. There are a few changes which have added few major things in the SDK. I would like to throw light on those features. 

New Layouts- The javafx.scene.layout packages has been added with the new Layout classes which are:

• ClipView- A Container which acts as a clipping view of its contents. The ClipView does not provide any visuals, but does potentially respond to unblocked mouse events by panning the clipped region.
• Flow-The Flow container lays out its content nodes in either a horizontal or vertical flow, wrapping at its width (for horizontal) or height (for vertical).
• LayoutInfo-Defines a set of common layout variables that can be used to specify how a particular node should be layed out within the layout space allocated to it by its parent container.
• LayoutInfoBase-The base class for defining node-specific layout information
• Panel-The Panel container can be configured as an object literal (vs. subclassing) to perform customized layout.
• Stack-The Stack container arranges its content nodes in a back-to-front stack. The z-order of the content is defined by the order of the content sequence with content[0] being the bottom and content[sizeof content-1] being the top.
• Tile-The Tile container lays out its content nodes in uniformly sized layout spaces or "tiles". Tile supports both horizontal (default) and vertical orientations.

Adding an Alert class to javafx.stage. This is used to show alert dialog windows. This was pretty necessary provided the way these dialog boxes are used in Swing.

Persistence Storage-
A new package javafx.io has been added. This has classes: Resource and Storage. This allows the user to locally store the data on the client system. This way the data is available when the user runs the application next time.

Linux and Solaris users must be happy now- JavaFX is now supported on OpenSolaris 2009.06 and Ubuntu 8.04. Though its in Beta but this should come as a boon for programmers working on these environments. This will also help in increasing the adoption of JavaFX.

UI Control Components-
Till 1.2 programmers had to make use of makeshift Swing components for JavaFX. Gone are those times, with 1.2 developers can make use of the skinnable JavaFX controls defined in the javafx.scene.control package. Tools added include- Button, CheckBox, Hyperlink, Label, ListView, ProgressBar, ProgressIndicator, RadioButton, ScrollBar, Slider, TextBox, ToggleButton. I have used few of the controls in the sample here.

UI Char Components-
This is another major addition in the 1.2 SDK. Now the data can be effectively depicted by using the Charts API. This is a boost in the productivity of JavaFX. Charts used include: AreaChart, BarChart, BarChart3D, BubbleChart, LineChart, PieChart, PieChart3D, ScatterChart, XYChart.

Support for RSS and Atom Feeds. New classes have been added to support the parsing of RSS and Atom feeds.

New packages javafx.date and javafx.util have been added with few utilitiy classes and math support.

These are some of the features which I thought were worth mentioning. I would try to use few of these in the samples i would be writing in future. Meanwhile let me try learning creating application using multiple screens blogs.sun.com/images/smileys/wink.gif" class="smiley" alt=";)" title=";)" />

Posted at 11:56PM Jun 19, 2009 by Mohammed Sanaulla in JavaFX  |  Comments[0]