Interview posts on webtechie.be highlight developers, makers, and tool creators who share practical insights about Java, JavaFX, embedded systems, and building products that people actually use.
Every week I collect a list of posts, social messages, videos, etc. related to JavaFX on the JFX Central Links Of The Week. One of the regular “appearances” is Helal Anwar, who is building impressive educational tools with JavaFX. In this interview, we discuss his GradedAttendance application and other JavaFX projects he’s working on.
Every week I collect a list of posts, social messages, videos, etc. related to JavaFX on the JFX Central Links Of The Week. That’s how I recently found a message from Lidiany Cerqueira on LinkedIn about CERCA. It’s a tool she created during her Christmas break to detect false/hallucinated references in scientific manuscripts.
I met Florian Enner a few times at Devoxx in Belgium, and each time he amazed me with his JavaFX demos! He is one of those rare developers who take JavaFX to the next level by adding 3D visualizations.
I don’t have any bitcoin myself, but still find the idea of the blockchain and “public shared money” fascinating. And as it turns out, there is a free and open-source bitcoin wallet, created with JavaFX, that wants to help people understand how the Bitcoin system works, and make transactions easy to understand. Thanks to the work of Craig Raw, there is an easy-to-use desktop application to create and manage wallets. And while he explains the app itself, we also learn a lot about the Bitcoin ecosystem, reproducible builds, security, hardware wallets, and more!
For my next JavaFX In Action interview, I talked with Matt Coley about Recaf and the JavaFX libraries he’s working on. But unexpectedly, I got a deep-dive course on Java byte code, obfuscated code, and how JARs can be (ab)used to hide the real code they are executing…!
Vlad Protsenko is a Clojure developer working at Defold. While I initially wanted to learn about the Cljfx project, our conversation evolved into a learning experience: a practical getting-started guide to Clojure, a hands-on demonstration of building JavaFX user interfaces with minimal code, and an inside look at the Defold game engine and its JavaFX-based IDE.
During a live stream coding session, Matti Tahvonen and I updated an existing Vaadin+Spring+Pi4J demo application to use the latest version of the libraries and Java 25. It’s a demo application I created a few years ago to using during presentations at conferences. Of course, everything evolves, so a big update and refactoring was needed.
Dirk Lemmermann has created many open source and commercial libraries for Java Swing and JavaFX like CalenderFX, FlexGanttFX, GemsFX,… He is also the founder of JFX Central, the home to anything JavaFX related. In this interview he shows us some of his work, including applications used in companies, revealing the power of JavaFX to build custom tools.
Gerrit Grunwald, also known in the Java community as HanSolo on social media, created many JavaFX libraries and blog posts. I wanted to talk with him about his work with JavaFX, but I also learned more about SVGs and how the garbage collectors in the JVM work, thanks to the amazing visualizations he creates with … JavaFX of course.
Brian has a dream job! He is responsible for a complex system that allows scientific researchers to research the animals living in the deep sea. He provides them with the tools to annotate videos and images made by submarines diving thousands of meters deep in the oceans. While he works on this software, he gets to know all the amazing creatures living in this mysterious world.
Out of frustration about the existing (expensive) tools to interact with Kafka clusters, Cormac Redmond created his own beautiful tool that he shares for free!
Chris Newland has a long history in Java and JavaFX development. I invited him to talk about two of his JavaFX projects: DemoFX and JITWatch. While the demos are already impressive, Chris also gives a “crash course” in this video about Java and Byte code and how the Just-In-Time compiler converts these to native code in the Java Virtual Machine.
Every week I collect JavaFX-related content for the JFX Central Links Of The Week. Last week I saw a video on LinkedIn, shared by Abdoulaye Wade Cissé, of a JavaFX “virtual laboratorium” and wanted to learn more about this project… Turns out he is a 22-year old student in Senegal, creating an amazing project to provide a virtual laboratory as software where the resources are not available for a physical lab. With his project, he proves that Java and JavaFX is the ideal way to generate fully free software with a lot of functionality.
Sven Reimers created a JavaFX-based notebook application to make it easier to learn Java and experiment with notebooks that can visualize the variables in different ways like tables and graphs.
Mike Hearn solves a problem that a lot of developers are struggling with: how to easily distribute your application and make sure the users get the latest version. With Conveyor he created a tool to do that easily with JavaFX, Electron, and Flutter apps!
Jago de Vreede is bringing SDKMAN to Windows! He builds a user interface on top of the terminal tool to make it easier to use, and add the same time solves the problem that you could only use SDKMAN on Linux and macOS. In the previous “JFX In Action” interview we saw how jDeploy can be used to distribute a JavaFX application, and in this one we see how you can achieve the same with GraalVM, although it is more difficult to setup. In the video, he walks us through the GitHub Actions that he created to build those native binaries. Jago also shows us how he uses SceneBuilder to create the layout of the app.
Building a Java(FX) app is easy and fun, but how do you efficiently distribute it to different systems? jpackage and GraalVM can help, but jDeploy makes things even more effortless by handling all the packaging and providing an upgrading flow! In this “JFX In Action” interview, you’ll learn how this works from Steve Hannah, the creator of jDeploy.
In the “JFX In Action” interviews, we already saw many business use cases of JavaFX. Let’s take a side step and look at game development. FXGL is a library that helps us create JavaFX games. But it’s much more than games! With the integrated Goal-Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) functionality, it can use game technology and AI to solve any kind of goal based on actions and preconditions.
In the previous “JFX In Action” interviews, we already saw combinations of JavaFX with Scala and Kotlin. In this episode, we look at the combination of JavaFX and Quarkus. Thanks to QuarkusFX, we can use the many advantages of the Quarkus system to create a desktop application.
The following “JFX In Action” interview gives insights into a new open-source JavaFX project: Swaggerific. It’s created by Özkan Pakdil, who tells us more about this Postman alternative to interact with REST endpoints documented with a Swagger JSON.
Here is the next “JFX In Action” with Ulas Ergin. He explains how his team uses JavaFX to migrate from a Swing based application, to a Java application which combines the old Swing screens with new React user interfaces.
Here is the next “JFX In Action” with Christoph Schwentker about JabRef, a tool written in Java and JavaFX to collect, organize, and discover literature for research projects.
In the next “JFX In Action”, I’m returning to Televic, one of my former employers, to talk to Ramiro Domínguez Ayub. He explains how they create a tool with JavaFX that is used both internally and by their customers to update a lot of different types of devices on a train, tram, and/or metro.
In the next video in this “JFX In Action” series, I talked with Maciej Gorywoda about FxCalculator, an Android app created with Scala and JavaFX you can find in Google Play.
In the next video in this “JFX In Action” series, I talked with Robert Ladstätter about LogoRRR, an application written with Scala and JavaFX.
In the next video in this “JFX In Action” series, I talked with Christopher Schnick about XPipe, a tool to manage all your servers.
For the second video in this “JFX In Action” series, I talked to Daniel Zimmermann. He got my attention when he recently tweeted: “To your dismay I have to tell you I write all my desktop applications using Kotlin and JavaFX”. Why is he a big Kotlin AND JavaFX fan? I asked him and got a demo of the network test application that he is working on.
People who follow me, know I have a big love for JavaFX. It’s my go-to for every desktop user interface application I build. I love the simplicity of quickly creating an app that makes full use of the “Java powers” to build both multi-threaded “backend services” combined with a beautiful-looking UI into one executable. I’m starting a new video series “JFX In Action” in which I talk to developers to show the world what is being developed with JavaFX, starting with Pedro Duque Vieira about the JavaFX libraries and apps he creates.
Just like Foojay wants to be the starting place for all info related to Java, JFX Central is the place to be for all JavaFX info. The website is a project started by Dirk Lemmermann and has been online since 2021. The team has expanded since then, and the content has been extended, partially by the team, but also thanks to many contributors from the JavaFX community. End of August, a new user interface has been published to replace the initial version.
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!”
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…
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.