Once again we are organizing a three-day conference completely focused on JavaFX. This year we call it “JFX Days”. The conference website including venue information and last year’s presentations can be found at jfx-days.com. Each day will offer ample opportunity to talk, discuss, and enjoy fine food.

Day 1: we will have a workshop given by Anton Epple where attendees will take a deep dive into performance related aspects of JavaFX coding.

Day 2: sessions from dusk till dawn. You find the planned sessions below.

Day 3: a second workshop will focus on testing JavaFX applications. This workshop will be given by Sergey Grinev who used to work at Oracle inside the JavaFX team.

 

Planned Sessions

 

Keynote / Real World Applications / Show & Tell

Dirk Lemmermann, DLSC,

JavaFX applications are being used in many different domains by many small and large companies. However, most people never get to see these applications as they are being developed and used behind closed company doors. In the keynote we will present several “real world” applications. The “show and tell” section will give attendees the opportunity to also show the cool stuff that they have been working on.

 

The JavaFX Roadmap

Johan Vos, Gluon, Wolfgang Weigend, Oracle

​About a year ago, JavaFX 11 was released. This was the first release after JavaFX has been decoupled from the core JDK. Since the decoupling was announced, developers from Oracle, Gluon and other companies worked together to ensure that the JavaFX platform was modularized, and that JavaFX developers could use the JavaFX API’s in the same way they use other API’s. As part of the decoupling, a mirror on github has been created for making the development of OpenJFX easier and more transparent to developers that are used to modern development systems. After that work was done, focus turned again to new functionalities and improvements. The development of JavaFX is mainly driven by its contributors and their customers.

In this session:​

  • we look at the most important new feature in JavaFX 13: native rendering support

  • we look into the new features that are being developed as part of JavaFX 14 and beyond, including support for Metal

  • we explain the new packaging mechanisms, including jpackage and GraalVM support

  • we focus on the WORA aspects of JavaFX. Increasingly, more platforms are supported, including desktop, mobile and embedded.

 

From GitHub Source to GitHub Release: Free CI/CD Pipelines for JavaFX Apps

Bruno Borges, Microsoft

Streamline the building, testing, packaging, and release of your desktop JavaFX applications for all major platforms with simple to use CI/CD Pipelines and GitHub. This session will cover the details of combining GitHub for hosting source code and binaries for Mac OS, Windows and Linux of your application, and how to take advantage of Azure Pipelines plan for Open Source projects. We will learn about using a Maven archetype and a Gradle starter project for JavaFX apps, both ready for CI/CD and how they are configured. Join this talk and get ready to streamline your desktop apps just like your microservices.

 

​​NativeFX

Michael Hoffer, https://mihosoft.eu

NativeFX brings the power of JavaFX to the next level. It provides access to any native visualization library or app that can render to a shared memory buffer. This enables the integration of WebGL/OpenGL, Vulkan, Qt and more to the scene graph. We will showcase WebGL and Qt in this presentation. Since NativeFX uses multiple processes, native code can’t crash the JVM. These are essential features for many industrial and scientific applications that rely on a specific visualization technology that can’t be easily ported to JavaFX. You get the reliability of the Java platform and the power of native rendering technologies. In this presentation you will learn how to use NativeFX for your own projects. Additionally, we will discuss how you can create your own native renderer.

 

JavaFX Testing

Sergey Grinev, Azul Systems, Inc.

​Once you’ve built a beautiful and reliable JavaFX application you’ll want to keep it this way. To address that in this session we’ll talk about automated testing of JavaFX UI application. We’ll identify main challenges and look at best practices of the JavaFX UI testing and review frameworks which can help with test automation of JavaFX apps: JemmyFX used by Oracle to test JavaFX platform itself, another OpenSource one TestFX, and commercial framework TestComplete.

 

​JavaFX on Mobile – A Big Update!

Johan Vos, Gluon

Since we launched the JavaFXPorts initiative, it has been possible for JavaFX developers to deploy their applications on Android and iOS devices. While there are great apps out there created this way, the limits imposed by Apple and Google have been challenging. As a consequence, the mobile ports always were a few versions behind the desktop releases, and not all of the latest Java functionality was supported. With the new GraalVM, and especially the native-image functionality that is part of it, you can now create JavaFX apps with the very latest JDK release (13) and the very latest JavaFX release (13). Another benefit of GraalVM is the excellent AOT compiler, resulting in much faster startup. In this session, we’ll show how GraalVM is changing the Java landscape in general, and we focus on the consequences for mobile/embedded.​​​

 

JavaFX in the Browser: JPRO

Florian Kirmaier (Sandec, JPro One)

This session will show how to develop and deploy with JPro, which enables Java programs to run in standard web browsers without a plugin.  By taking a deeper look into some real-world applications, the audience will learn how Java can be used for cross platform development, to write applications for not only desktops, but also for mobile devices and web browsers.  The audience will learn how a typical web page can be created with pure Java.  And the code for the web page runs not only in browsers, but also as native apps (desktops, iOS or Android).  A new portal, a web-based JavaFX ensemble, will be announced and presented, which already consolidates a number of prominent JavaFX libraries, such as ControlsFX and JFoenix and can hopefully serve as a common API Portal for many more libraries in time to come.  Attendees will also learn how to let Java code interoperate with currently popular web technologies such as Angular and React.​

 

OpenWebStart / AdoptOpenJDK

Hendrik Ebbers, Karakun

​The fine folks over at Karakun are working on a replacement for Java Webstart and Hendrik will update us on the status of this project and how you can use it to deploy your Java application. Another important initiative is AdoptOpenJDK where developers now have the liberty to pick from several Java distributions, some of which bundle JavaFX, some do not.