Although I skipped a few weeks because of busy schedules, holiday interruptions, and too few hours in a day, there was still a lot to report in the two #LinksOfTheWeek that were published on jfx-central.com in July.

To make it as easy as possible to get started with Java on the Raspberry Pi to interact with electronic components, I started a new section on the Pi4J website with JBang examples.

On Twitter - sorry, X - and Mastodon I asked the following question: “In software development, “Domain-Driven Design” (#DDD) is one of the many great (?) ways to handle a project. But who has experienced other types of DDD in real life, like “Deadline-Driven Development” or “Disaster-Driven Development”, and wants to share her/his experience for a blog? Thanks!”

Again a lot has been shared this month in the jfx-central.com #LinksOfTheWeek! And that website itself is “under heavy construction” as version 2 is getting a completely new design and several improvements. Your help is wanted! See the last section of this summary…

With the April release of the Zulu Build of OpenJDK, Azul announced the integration of CRaC in its version 17 of Java for Linux. Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) is a feature introduced in OpenJDK to improve Java’s application startup and warmup times to milliseconds from seconds or even minutes, by allowing a running application to pause, snapshot its state, and restart later, even on a different machine.

Writing has always been my passion, and even in my previous jobs as a developer, I stood out as the one who enjoyed creating and maintaining documentation. But June 9th, 2023, marked my first birthday as a full-time technical writer at Azul. Yes, it’s already a year ago that I changed from being a developer-who-also-writes to a writer-who-also-develops. Let’s take a moment to reflect on my incredible journey over the past year.

Again a busy month in JavaFX-world! Here is a nice list with links for your reading and clicking pleasure! This is the summary of the #LinksOfTheWeek as published on jfx-central.com in May 2023.

Some time ago on Twitter, I discovered @OrangoMango, who shared his progress in creating a 3D engine with JavaFX. The shared videos started with a Rubik’s cube in January ’23, over a basic tumbling car in February, to a full Minecraft-like world in April. Who is this @OrangoMango? And why did he take up the challenge to create a 3D engine with Java and JavaFX? Let’s find out…

This is the summary of the #LinksOfTheWeek as published on jfx-central.com.

JavaFX Core

• Gluon announced JavaFX update releases: 20.0.1 (latest release), 17.0.7 (latest LTS), and for Gluon LTS customers 11.0.19.
• In this video with Kevin Rushforth he talks about JavaFX 20 and beyond.
  • Dirk Lemmermann tweeted some of the highlights like RichTextArea, ideas for future releases,…
  • The Notebook demo is looking really nice to learn JavaFX in an easy way.

Conferences

• As announced a few weeks ago, Sean Phillips was one of the keynote speakers at DevNexus in Atlanta. And his talk did not go unnoticed…
  • Ixchel Ruiz: “Blowing the ceiling of technology, passion, visualization”
  • Johan Vos: “Innovation by and for devs/humans. Great to see all of this coming together”
  • Vincent Mayers: “It’s clear that JavaFX is AMAZING! Thank you GluonHQ and Johan Vos for all your work and support for this”
  • And many more…
  • The intro animation of his talk was shared on Reddit and shows the creators of the libraries used in his application as if they are trapped in the Matrix…

Building apps

• CodeDead shared a GitHub Actions workflow for the people that are using JDK 20, Gradle and JavaFX 20 on Reddit to test, build and package your JavaFX application on Windows, Linux and macOS when creating a pull request on either the main/master or development branches of your GIT project.

JavaFX Scene Builder

• Version 20 is about ready. Feel free to test the latest snapshots and report blocking issues.
• Chad Preisler shared a video on how to use GemsFX in Scene Builder.

Bumped to Java and JavaFX 20:

• LibHEIF 1.2.3
• JabRef with speed improvements on macOS
• Opal v1.1.0
• LibrawFX 1.8.4

Regular guests

OrangoMango

• Found a performance problem in his 3D engine, thanks to Almas Baim and VisualVM.
• Added transparent blocks to his 3D engine.
• Is creating a chess game and shares the code on GitHub. You can play chess in LAN (Java sockets) and export a game to FEN and PGN.

Almas Baim

• Adding hex support for tiled .tmx maps to FXGL.
• Playing with a cat and PixelBuffer on April 1st.
• FXGL is also catching the Stable Diffusion train.
• Combining a black hole with a rasengan.
• Messing around with a TextArea and physics.
• Taking the term “physically based rendering” to a whole new level
• Shared a video showing a game with many subtle visual effects. Go fullscreen to see all details!
• And he is also trying to hypnotize you….

Gerrit Grunwald

• Created a PoincarePlots while being on a plane and added it to version 17.1.35 of his charts library.

Miscellaneous

• Tobias Briones is using math to draw flowers.
  • And in an oher tweet it’s not a bird, not a cat: It’s the bird cat!
• Cédric Champeau is working on an astronomy toy project: a collection of libraries and applications for astronomy image processing in Java.
  • A blog post with more info and screenshots and video demos is available.
• Mariusz Materna announced a new version of LogViewFX, a desktop application that makes viewing logs easier.
• Artur Skowronski asked for RSS for this LinksOfTheWeek, and it will be available soon…
• CodeDead is rebuilding a .NET desktop application to improve the performance and make it cross-platform.
• Malik happily shared his first JavaFX application.
• Smith Ayo is creating an Oware game.
• Bruno Borges is looking into his crystal ball for 2024: “Oracle announces FxWeb, a framework for building WebAssembly UI with JavaFX, so you can code Java in both client and server side.”
• Christopher Schnick is enhancing the gameplay experience of Paradox Grand Strategy games with JavaFX through the Pdx-Unlimiter and releases it with JReleaser.
• Pedro Duque Vieira shared a testimonial of Fortune 500 company choosing for Java and JavaFX (place 171) with headquarters in New York, a world leader in its sector.
• On Reddit a video with 2D and 3D Pacman was published.
• siedlerchr shared a link to an excellent article explaining the concepts of Bindings, it’s from 2020 but still very valid.
• Jeannot Muller wrote about “JavaFX or Swing in 2023”.

About jfx-central.com

• New content: X-Pipe: a flexible connection manager and remote file explorer.
• Coding for version 2 of the jfx-central has started, check the Twitter thread if you want to join the development team.

On Foojay.io, Bazlur Rahman is publishing a series of interviews with various people from the OpenJDK community. I had the honor to be included in this series, and this is a repost.