Java – DLSC

JavaFX Days Zurich – Sessions

The holidays are over, time to get serious, time to fill the session catalogue for the JavaFX Days Zurich (Website). We managed to convince some of the best JavaFX experts to come to Switzerland and to show us the things they work on or work with. So without further ado here is a list of the currently scheduled sessions: JavaFX State of the Union Wolfgang Weigend, Oracle Corp. The current state of JavaFX UI development will be explained from the perspective of Oracle, with an inventory of existing development resources and the continuation of JavaFX in a free [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:24+01:00August 27th, 2018|Java, JavaFX, Speaking|0 Comments

JavaFX Real-World Apps: Monastery Disentis

Finally the first "JavaFX Real World Apps" post that actually covers an "app" and not an "application", meaning the first JavaFX application in this series that was designed for mobile devices and not the desktop. The application is simply called "Monastery Disentis". It was developed by cnlab in Switzerland. It can be used by visitors of the monastery as a guide. Below you can see a couple of screenshots that were taken on an Android device. Video: a screencast of the application. What is cool about this application is that everybody can try it out be following the [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:24+01:00May 8th, 2017|Java, JavaFX|5 Comments

JavaFX Animation Tool

Ok, I guess it is time to let you in on a little secret. The last three months or so I worked on a private project with the goal to create a tool that would allow me to easily create animations for Java desktop applications. JavaFX contains fantastic support on the API level for doing animations but for beginners or even intermediate level programmers it is not trivial to leverage it. However, when I use Apple's Keynote for creating presentation slides, or when I see the animation / slider plugins for Wordpress I realize how easy it can be to do animations, so [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:25+01:00March 24th, 2017|Java, JavaFX|0 Comments

JavaFX Tip 24: Custom Layouts for Performance and Flexibility

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 [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:25+01:00February 1st, 2017|CalendarFX, Java, JavaFX, Tips & Tricks|0 Comments

JavaFX Real-World Apps: SkedPal

A new entry in the "Real World Applications" series. This time it is SkedPal, an application for managing a busy person's life intelligently. I have been consulting the SkedPal team in matters related to JavaFX and also when they made the decision to start using the CalendarFX framework for their calendar requirements. Below you can see a couple of screenshots of this attractive application. If you want to try it out yourself then you can simply register on the SkedPal website and download the desktop client (they also have mobile clients). I have asked Saied ArBabian, the found of SkedPal to [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:25+01:00July 13th, 2016|FlexganttFX, Java, JavaFX|0 Comments

Shadow Fields vs. Property Accessor Interface

Carl Dea recently followed up on a blog post of mine called Save Memory! Use Shadow Fields for Properties. In his blog he suggested the use of an interface called "Property Accessor" to eliminate the heavy use of boilerplate code that is needed in order to use shadow fields. Carl also mentioned that he hasn't tested his approach with a lot of data and that he or some reader might follow up with a performance comparison. So here it comes. I wrote a small test application that implements the three strategies that Carl mentions in his post: standard properties that are instantiated [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:26+01:00April 4th, 2016|Java, JavaFX, Tips & Tricks|2 Comments

JavaFX Tip 23: Save Memory! Shadow Fields for Properties.

Properties and property bindings introduced in Java 8 are extremely useful programming concepts. They are especially useful when you are developing user interfaces. In fact they are so useful that developers have fallen victim to the idea that everything should be a property instead of a primitive. Unfortunately they easily forget that properties such as SimpleLongProperty are much bigger objects than standard types such as Long. And of course they are much bigger than primitive data types such as long. In one of my current projects pretty much every model object used by the client is composed of properties. For many of these [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:26+01:00March 30th, 2016|Java, JavaFX, Tips & Tricks|21 Comments

Never too old to learn!

Yesterday (March 16th) I celebrated my 47th birthday. I am now packing a solid 20 years of work experience and a masters degree in computer science. Still I managed to screw up bad. A potential customer of mine, who is currently evaluating FlexGanttFX for their application, contacted me and argued that the initial model creation takes too long. 22 seconds to be precise. I asked them to send me a standalone demo and when I ran it I could confirm that it takes a long time to create the model. After further investigation I realized that they were creating over 5 [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2016-07-15T16:01:33+02:00March 17th, 2016|FlexganttFX, Java|1 Comment

JavaFX Missing Features Survey: Table View

The TableView (and TreeTableView) of JavaFX has won the prize for being the control that was mentioned the most in my recent "JavaFX Missing Features" survey and also in many follow-up discussions (including and especially the guys in our Zurich JavaFX Meetup group). I guess one of the reasons is the simple fact that almost every application needs a table view. The two most requested features / improvements for the TableView were freezing rows / columns and better editing support. Freezing Rows / Columns Freeze / lock rows - the ability to have one or more rows to stay at [...]

By Dirk Lemmermann|2021-02-18T13:42:26+01:00February 3rd, 2016|Java, JavaFX|9 Comments

JavaFX “Missing Features” Survey Results

I recently conducted a survey asking the community to tell me which features they are missing the most in JavaFX 8. The survey has been closed by now. It received over 100 submissions from various people, various companies, various industries. Overall the participants very quite satisfied with JavaFX so I would argue that the feedback was submitted by people who really care about the platform and would like to see it evolve over time. The following chart shows the exact distribution of t