With the launch of exadel.org, it’s now very easy to try nightly builds of JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse, and view and submit new bugs. Using Jira (or the forum), you can tell us what features you would like to see in JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse. Our plan is to have a very short release cycle, around 2 weeks. We will fix bugs and add a few minor features each release. Let us know what features you would like to see!
JavaFX is a new scripting language from Sun (I guess now from Oracle) for building Java-based rich user interfaces for the Web, mobile, desktop and even TV. There are plenty of sources on the Internet the predicted or predict the death of JavaFX. Based on what Oracle said few weeks ago, JavaFX has a bright future. We, at Exadel, after playing with JavaFX for some time (see Flamingo, JavaFX Eclipse plug-in) believe that JavaFX is actually a great language to build rich user interfaces, and not only for Java-based applications. JavaFX script can be extended to be used as a view description language (VDL) for JSF or even HTML5.
What does it mean? Well, you no longer have to mix HTML with JSF tags. The entire page is developed from JavaFX nodes (UI components), using JavaFX’s object-oriented nature. Layout it defined via JavaFX layout controls. It will be now be possible (finally) to create real visual and drag-and-drop editor for JSF.
Another very powerful feature in JavaFX is binding. Any changes in the model are automatically updated in the UI, it’s possible to extend the same to JSF. No longer you have to specify what components to render via Ajax, it will be done automatically by the application. More about this feature from Alex Smirnov’s blog.
We already have a first version of JavaFX as JSF VDL (we are still looking for better name, any suggestions?), and here is a quick example. When a button is clicked, the label Hello X is updated with the number of clicks.
var x = 0; var bindVal = "Hello"; function init(){ FxPage{ content : [ FxForm{ content : [ FxOutputLabel{ value : bind bindVal }, FxCommandButton{ value : "Button" actionListener : function() : String{ bindVal = "Hello {x++}"; return null; } } ] } ] } }
JavaFX script above is processed and a standard JSF UI component tree is created as with Facelets.
For now the model is created inside the JavaFX file, but we are working on allowing to bind to JSF managed beans or CDI beans.
As you can see JavaFX is a very powerful UI language. We will make this library available soon. It works with JSF 2.
You can read more about JavaFX as JSF VDL for Alex Smirnov’s blog.
Check out Oracle’s Ellison sees success in Java-based middleware article by searchSOA.com. I was asked to provide feedback on Oracle’s plans with JavaFX. It’s pretty cool that my name is mentioned in the same article as Larry Ellison! It’s time for Larry to invite me to lunch.
New version of Exadel JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse is now available. There are a number of small features and bug fixes. We’re still working on a new internal platform with full easy-to-use services for open source management to host our open source projects. The JavaFX plug-in will be the first to go up on the new open source site, but in the meantime we are still developing it internally.
Great blog post by Tom Eugelink from JFXtras project on how to use Exadel’s JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse to develop JFXtras.
We kept kind of quite but Exadel has released JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse version 1.2. This version is now open source under GPL v2.0. Registration is no longer required to download. We are in the process of launching new site where this plug-in and other open source projects will be hosted.
Download the plug-in (registration is no longer required). The plug-in works with JavaFX 1.2 and 1.2.1.
New features:
Bug fixes:
2009 was a good year. RichFaces is more popular than ever today. Exadel has participated in hundreds of RichFaces engagements this year. I don’t remember how many trainings I’ve done this year but just since September I had a RichFaces training every other week. The forum is very active. RichFaces now has two books, one is mine, Practical RichFaces (Apress). The other books is called JBoss RichFaces 3.3 (Packt). There is also RichFaces DZone RefCard available.
My blog traffic has been steadily growing this year. To make it easier for readers, I have tagged all my RichFaces howto’s, tips and tricks with richfaces-howto tag. Now you can find all the posts quickly. And of course I also started using Twitter (http://twitter.com/maxkatz) this year. My first tweet and my first follower @kito99 via http://firstfollower.com/
If you tried JSF 2 (and you should, it’s much better than JSF 1.2. Here is a great post by Andy Schwartz and here is my JSF 2 series), you will notice that core Ajax features in JSF 2 are very similar to what has been available in RichFaces for a very long time now. You will see that f:ajax tag in JSF 2 works very similar to the popular a4j:support tag (see this blog post and this for more info). The RichFaces team is already working on RichFaces 4 which will be based on JSF 2.
This year I attended and spoke at a number of conferences. I started with JSFdays in Vienna, Austria in early April. End of April I attended JAX in Maintz, Germany. In June, I spoke at JavaOne 2009 and beginning of September presented at JBoss World in Chicago. My final conference was JSFSummit in Orlando in December.
With trainings and conferences (and some personal travel), I flew over 150,000 on United this year which makes me 1K again. I’m looking forward to system wide upgrades (for international travel) and new unlimited upgrades United announced earlier this year. If you travel frequently, I definitely recommend trying to stick with one airline. Even if you just get entry level status, travel usually becomes more pleasant.
Next year already looks very interesting. I already have three trainings booked and two conferences. I will be presenting and teaching RichFaces workshop JSFdays 2010 in Vienna in February and presenting for the first time at TheServerSide Symposium in Las Vegas in March.
If you have been reading my blog, you will know that we have been doing some interesting stuff with JavaFX. Exadel has been working on JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse and Flamingo framework. We have also worked on JavaFX and JSF integration. Although we could wished for a stronger “acceptance” of JavaFX this year especially in the enterprise, nevertheless, the community has been growing very strong. I have approached Sun on two different occasions with an offer to work together on some of the enterprise features for JavaFX but never got a reply back. Now that Oracle-Sun deal is close to being final and once Oracle takes ownership of JavaFX, we hope it [Oracle] will start using more JavaFX in the enterprise.
2010 (how are you going to say 2010?) is looking to be very interesting year. We have RichFaces 4.0, our JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse is going to be open source and have been adding very interesting mobile feature to Flamingo such as connector for Android. JavaFX and JSF integration also sounds very interesting. Stay tuned.
Happy New Year!
Excellent write up by Pavel Cherkashin (Exadel developer) who attended Chicago Java Users Group last week and listened to Sten Anderson (CITYTECH) present JavaFX and how they used Exadel Flamingo to build rich JavaFX application connected to Seam.
Great post by John Kraus from CITYTECH on how they used Exadel Flamingo to connect rich JavaFX UI to their existing Seam application. It’s good to see JavaFX slowly penetrating the enterprise. And with Flamingo, it becomes even simpler. Companies can leverage their existing services and easily connect them to JavaFX rich UI as CITYTECH did.
There are a number of interesting new features in Flamingo. There is now server-side push and off-line applications for JavaFX. There is also a connector for Google’s Android platform. I’m planning to blog about these technologies and more very soon. As for JavaFX tooling, we have been working on JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse. Try it out. The plug-in is going to be open source any day now.
Read blog post here
First screen shot of JavaFX visual designer in JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse. It’s too early to say when it’s going to be released, but as you can see we are working on it. You will soon be able to try nightly builds as we are making the plug-in open source.
TheServerSide Java Symposium: TheClientSide
Mar 17-19, 2010 | Enterprise JavaFX and Ajax with RichFaces sessions | $200 discount
Webinar: RichFaces 4 with JSF 2 June 2, 2009 | Details soon
