I am happy to announce that CalendarFX has found a new home on GitHub. As of today it is no longer a commercial product but an open source project. Over the last two years I have noticed that the developer community has resisted to use CalendarFX for their projects as the source code was not freely available. So now that CalendarFX has been released into the wild I am hoping that it will live a long and happy live.
I was interviewed by Hartmut Schlosser of jaxenter.de last week and this week the article was published (in German) on their website. You can find it here: https://jaxenter.de/javafx-java9-javascript-56083. The interview was embedded in the "JavaFX Sixpack" series that tries to evaluate the potential of JavaFX. Hartmut was kind enough to also include information on my two commercial JavaFX frameworks CalendarFX and FlexGanttFX.
The Problem As a framework developer it is essential to have an easy way to individually test the appearance of and the interaction with each custom control. I really hate it when I first have to open five different screens before I finally get to my new control so that I can test it. Not only is it annoying but it also costs too much time. When doing UI work you constantly make changes to your controls and look at the impact of those changes. If a single change roundtrip (code, launch, test) takes 5 minutes then you can only squeeze 12 change [...]
I just finished a two month sprint on advancing CalendarFX and getting it ready for release 8.4.0. One focus of this sprint was on performance. There are many things that can influence performance but when it comes to JavaFX the number of nodes in your scenegraph and CSS styling are top candidates for optimisation. After reviewing the custom controls that ship with CalendarFX I realized that many of them used a lot of nested panes (BorderPane, VBox, HBox, GridPane) in order to achieve a specific layout. Nested panes result in a high node count and complex CSS styling instructions. One simple example are [...]
I would like to inform you that version 8.4.0 of CalendarFX has seen the light of day today. You can download it here. The first thing you will notice is the different version scheme. CalendarFX now uses the target Java version as its first number. In this case 8. With Java 9 lurking around the corner there will be a Java 9 compatible version soon which will start with number 9. Even though this is a new major release the current license keys will continue to work. Anyone planning to upgrade to this release should be aware that there have [...]
Me and my team have recently begun work on a new view for CalendarFX with the initial goal to display a whole year in vertical columns. The name of the view is MonthGridView. As usual the goal has changed slightly while coding. The view is now capable of displaying any number of months with extra months added in front or in the back. Now, for example, the developer can choose to display six months (a semester) with one month "padding" in front and one month in the back. The following screenshot shows an entire year with no padding. In [...]
If you are interested you can now see CalendarFX live in action. As of version 1.7 the AI scheduling software SkedPal has replaced their Swing-based calendar (MigCalendar) with CalendarFX 1.3 for JavaFX 8. The result is a much more consistent look and feel and user experience.
I have released a new version of CalendarFX today. Version 1.3 contains several small bug fixes, important memory leak fixes, and most importantly a big fix for correctly displaying different "first day of week" (e.g. Mondays in Germany, Sundays in the US). The new release can be downloaded as usual at http://www.calendarfx.com. Please take it for a spin and let me know what you think. CalendarFX is a UI framework for JavaFX 8. It contains several custom controls for visualizing standard calendar information (day, week, month, year view). CalendarFX is a commercial framework that is available for licensing.
I had a nice long talk today with the guys from Sandec (sandec.de). They were showing me their product called "Centralized Java (CJ)". With this solution it is actually possible to run a JavaFX application in a browser (for now it works best with Chrome). The website javafx-samples.com shows several demos that are using this technology. The demos include the JavaFX SceneBuilder, the game 2048, the JavaFX Ensemble demo suite. It is amazing how much of these applications is supported by CJ. There are still a few gaps but the folks at Sandec are planning to close them soon. [...]