This summer I read the book “Entreprenerd” by Bruno Lowagie. It tells the story of how he started with the iText PDF Java library and turned that into a company together with his wife, and eventually sold it with all problems related to most sales and acquisitions trajects… In “Entreprenerd”, he also describes the process of writing two books about the iText library itself, as there were no good manuals available and he wanted to liberate himself from the ever-returning same questions. When I received this book about FXGL, I immediately had to think back to the story of Bruno. Who better to write a book about a library than Almas, the creator himself?

Links used in my talks at Devoxx 2022 (Antwerp, Belgium) and J-Fall (Ede, The Netherlands).

The JavaFX links of the week are back on jfx-central.com, and here we collect the complete month for you in an excellent overview.

It has been a while since I last had to create documents in a program, and iText has been “on my radar” to try out for a while now. This weekend we had a party and wanted to organize a music bingo. For this, we needed a set of randomly selected songs to be printed out per person. A small Java project seemed to be the best solution, otherwise, this would have been a boring, manual, and repetitive task. Isn’t that the goal of most of our developments? “Automate the boring stuff!”

As I’m becoming a senior developer in terms of age, I’ve transitioned from one language to another. One of my main interests has always been clean, easy-to-understand UIs (User Interface). That journey started for me with Director (to create multimedia CD-ROMs), Flash website animation, and Flex Rich Internet Applications (= “Flash on steroids”). When I started developing with Java over 10 years ago, we had some projects with the early versions of Vaadin and JavaFX. As I went on with serverside applications, I only continued with JavaFX for some personal and side projects, and loved the way you can create a UI both with XML (FXML actually) and code, exactly the same approach I loved with Flex. Since then, my love for Java and JavaFX only grew and it’s still my major programming environment.

English version below

Ik heb een vrouw, kind, hond en kat. Mijn Java-collega waar ik al meer dan jaar dagelijks mee samen werk, heeft ook een vrouw, kinderen, hond en kat. We willen gewoon ons gang gaan, werken om te leven, ons kleine steentje bijdragen om van deze wereld een leuke plaats te maken. Het enige verschil tussen ons twee, is de plaats waar we wonen. Ik woon in een dorp dat 100 jaar geleden tijdens de “grote oorlog” plat gebombardeerd werd. Hij woont in Ukraïne, het land dat momenteel aan stukken wordt geschoten, waar de losgeslagen Russen om-weet-ik-veel-welke-reden aanspraak willen op maken en daarvoor alle mogelijke oorlogsmisdaden inzetten.

If you create a new SD card for a Raspberry Pi with the operating system, you can choose the “Raspberry Pi OS Full (32-bit)” edition, which includes Java 11. But a lot of the other available OS-versions don’t have Java included.

On the OpenJFX website you can find a lot of getting started documentation. But as one image/video says more than a thousand words, I created this short movie to show you that creating a new JavaFX project is just a matter of a few clicks with the JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA.

The Pinecil is a very handy and affordable USB-C powered soldering iron (running on open firmware!) with an OLED monochrome display. This soldering iron is made by PINE64, and is delivered in nice carton boxes. But once you start using it, you quickly need another way to keep the different tips at hand.

As part of the Pi4J project, we created an example game with JavaFX and FXGL that uses an Arcade kit with a Joystick and big push buttons. The test setup for this project was kicking around my desk, so that was the perfect victim for my next 3D printing project…