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.
Do you know the problem that you have done a specific task already many times in the past, but it’s too long ago to remember exactly how you did it the previous times? One of those cases for me, is how you create a JavaFX ComboBox and configure it to show a specific field of an object in the opened and closed state of the ComboBox.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of March 2025. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.
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.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of February 2025. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.
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.
Here is the first overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth for 2025. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.
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!
When a nerdy dad and 14-year-old music-playing son join forces and start experimenting with music and code, some nice things can happen. Did you ever present your music piece in a business dashboard with charts? Did you know that the FXGL game library can be used to generate a piano with fireworks? And can Virtual Threads playback MIDI events with just a few lines of code and thousands of threads?
Here is the last overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth for 2024. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com. We hope you enjoyed all the previous editions and we promise to go on in the next year… Have a nice holiday and see you in 2025!
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.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of November 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.
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.
These are the links of the presentation “Looking at Music, an experiment with Kotlin, JavaFX, MIDI, and Virtual Threads” of Thursday November 7th, 16:55-17:45, Room 2.
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.
When I spoke to developers at Devoxx in Belgium in October, I was surprised to learn how many of them are maintaining systems that are still running on Java 8 (released in 2014). One of them even still has a Java 5 application in production, with a runtime of 20 years old!
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of October 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month. With some very nice new content for JFX Central itself, see at end of the list… Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.
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.
These are the links of the presentation “Looking at Music, an experiment with Kotlin, JavaFX, MIDI, and Virtual Threads” of Wednesday October 9th, 16:40-17:30, Room 7.
Recently, I was asked what the best way is to build a Fat JAR (a JAR with all dependencies) using Maven. Therefore, I created a GitHub project javafx-jar-template that you can use as a starting point. It contains a small JavaFX demo application with the TilesFX dependency and the necessary plugins in the pom.xml file.
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.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of September 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.
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.
Recently I have been experimenting with the combination of JavaFX and Kotlin. As Kotlin also runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and is a very close sister of Java, the switch is straightforward. I’m not making full use of what Kotlin can offer (non-blocking coroutines for example) as this is still a learning path for me… But I want to show you in this tutorial the difference in code style.
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.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of August 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month. Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of July 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month.
Last week I was working on a blog post about Azul Zulu with JavaFX support for ARM systems, like the Raspberry Pi. As you can see in this video, I found out my little test application with a lot of “bouncing balls” started losing performance on the Raspberry Pi with more than 1000 of those balls.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of June 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month.
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.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of May 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month.
For a personal pet project, I started experimenting with JavaFX and Kotlin to create a user interface with a lot of Java / Kotlin background processing. As I knew there is a book available on this specific topic, Apress was so kind to send me a review copy of Frontend Development with JavaFX and Kotlin: Build State-of-the-Art Kotlin GUI Applications by Peter Späth (152 pages, 48€ on paper, 35.5€ for ebook on Amazon.nl).
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of April 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of March 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month.
At the Fosdem conference in Brussels on February 3rd, I gave a presentation about using an existing documentation set as the data for a ChatGPT-like application, created with JavaFX and LangChain4J. The video and links of that presentation are available here, and this post is a more detailed explanation of that application.
Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of February 2024 that got published on jfx-central.com during this month.
These are all the links of my presentation at the Fosdem Conference in Brussels, Saturday, February 3th, 2024, 17:40 CET.
This is the first JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth review for 2024, an overview of the LinksOfTheWeek that got published on jfx-central.com during January.
This is the final JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth review for 2023. It was an amazing year with many evolutions in Java and JavaFX and a complete “fresh” version of JFX Central. Thanks for following these updates and looking forward to more of your JavaFX work in the new year…
I had a lot of interesting talks with Java experts since I started producing the Foojay Podcast. But when I asked the organizers of the J-Fall conference, if I could do some kind of live broadcast at their event, I hadn’t imagined it would be such an amazing experience! During the day I had 29 interviews, which I all broadcasted live on multiple websites (YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter) with the amazing restream system.
FXGL is a framework to easily create JavaFX-based game applications. In this blog post, I want to show you how this can be done within a single Java-file which doesn’t need a full Maven or Gradle project but can be executed directly with JBang without compilation. This approach can be used as an easy way to get new Java(FX) developers started or create your first experiments with FXGL.
Have fun with this overview of the “JavaFX LinksOfTheWeek” that got published on jfx-central.com during November.
Thanks to the Devoxx conference, there are many hours you can spend on JavaFX-related videos! But as every month, there is a lot more to read and learn about JavaFX… Have fun with this overview of the “JavaFX LinksOfTheWeek” that got published on jfx-central.com during October.
One of the most “fancy” electronic components is definitely a LED strip. It’s really cool to control a long strip of lights with only a few lines of code… But, there is a problem. The timing of the signals is crucial to reliably control these strips. Both Python and Java on a Raspberry Pi can struggle with these timings as they are running on Linux, a non-real-time operating system. So, for instance, pauses in the garbage collection of the Java virtual machine, or any glitch in the operating system can cause unexpected effects on the LED strips. That’s why in most projects, a microcontroller (Arduino, Raspberry Pi Pico, ESP32,…) is used to drive the LED strip. In my search for a good solution to use LED strips with Java, I stumbled on the Pixelblaze Output Expander. This small device is controlled through a serial interface, and handles the control of the LED strip. As it turns out, this is a perfect solution to offload the timing-critical operations from the Raspberry Pi and have reliable output on a LED strip.
This month OpenJDK and OpenJDK 21 got officially released, so links to the new downloads but also to the early access builds of the next one! Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheWeek that got published on jfx-central.com during September.
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.
I’ve taken a holiday this month, so probably missed a lot of the amazing JavaFX news, but still some things caught my attention and you can find them in this LinksOfTheMonth overview.
Yes, the Raspberry Pi Operating System is awesome! But the Pi4J project made it if even more awesome by adding “goodies” for Java developers! Pi4J OS is not yet another OS, but the official Raspberry Pi OS, with additional tools and preconfigurations to make it the ideal OS for any Java and JavaFX developer who wants to use a Raspberry Pi.
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.
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…
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.
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.
This is the summary of the #LinksOfTheWeek as published on jfx-central.com.
February is a short month, but this list seems to be longer than ever… A lot of game development, releases, interesting ongoing development, and so much more to read. Enjoy reading and clicking!
2023 has taken off with a flying start in JavaFX-world!
Here is a summary of the Links Of The Week that were published in January on jfx-central.com.
If anyone needs a reminder Java and JavaFX are “alive and kicking”, you can not only check out jfx-central.com, but also the list below.
Time flies when having fun…
So here we are again, another month has passed and this is a summary of the Links Of The Week that were published on jfx-central.com during November.
After my talk at J-Fall I got the question what is required to get started with #JavaOnRaspberryPi. In my book I list the components that are used, but indeed a short overview was missing (it’s now added to the ebook…). So here we go:
When I (re)started the JavaFX Links Of The Week on jfx-central.com in September, I was wondering if there would be enough material to share every week.
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.
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.
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…
In the previous post we started our discovery of HiveMQ Cloud with Java on the Raspberry Pi. We created an application to send measurements of various sensors to the HiveMQ Cloud MQTT broker. Using an online websocket client we verified the transition of the messages, and could see the data being published to this online message queue.
The Raspberry Pi in combination with an inexpensive touch screen, makes a perfect controller for a machine or game console. Let’s see how we can use Java and JavaFX to build a test application which also communicates with the pins of the Raspberry Pi to control a LED. We have done something before already in the post “Light Up your Christmas Tree with Java and Raspberry Pi”, so what’s new?
In a previous post “Getting Started with FXGL Game Development” we already have taken a look at the FXGL game development framework developed by Almas Baimagambetov.
Today I could give my talk “Having fun with Java and JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi” at the JFXDays. Normally this event takes place in Zurich, but this year also went virtual because… well because of 2020…
The post “Starting a JavaFX Project with Gluon Tools” shows you how to start a Gluon Mobile Multiview project with a few clicks in IntelliJ IDEA thanks to the “Gluon plugin”.
On foojay.io you can already find two posts by Carl Dea to get you started with JavaFX:
Today I had my first Devoxx talk, after my Java virtual talk a few weeks ago at the “Oracle Groundbreakers APAC Virtual Tour 2020” conference (21/10)! The event in Ukraine also went virtual which gave me the opportunity to share my love for Java, JavaFX and the Raspberry Pi again.
Confused about the release cycles of OpenJDK and OpenJFX and the relationship between them? Read on!
After my virtual conference talk “Java and JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi” at the “Oracle Groundbreakers APAC Virtual Tour 2020”, I got in touch with some people who were working on JavaFX 3D in the past, and were curious how that would behave on the Raspberry Pi.
Today I had the honor to speak at the “Oracle Groundbreakers APAC Virtual Tour 2020” conference. And of course the title of my talk was “Java and JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi”.
Thanks to Twitter and LinkedIn I got into contact with several developers who are doing Java stuff on Raspberry Pi and I want to share those projects with you as they can be an inspiration for all of us to get started with Java development on the Raspberry Pi.
For this post I did some experiments with Java 15, reusing the Ubuntu 64bit SD card which was also used for the earlier post “Comparing a REST H2 Spring versus Quarkus application on Raspberry Pi”.
In a previous post “Installing Java and JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi”, you can read how to install BellSoft LibericaJDK to be able to run JavaFX applications with a graphical user interface on a Raspberry Pi with ARMv7 or ARMv8 processor.
FXGL is a Java, JavaFX and Kotlin Game Library (Engine) made by Almas Baimagambetov. As my son (almost 10y) challenged me to make a game during my “Corona-stay-at-home-time”, I had the luck Almas provided me a getting-started with this detailed step-by-step.
One of the most read articles on this blog is about the installation of a recent Java on Raspberry Pi (March 13, 2019), so it’s time for an update!
Based on multiple examples from my book “Getting started with Java on Raspberry Pi”, I created a touchscreen controller for the drum booth of my son. Combined with relays boards and an Arduino this allows to control LED strips and different lights with a touch screen interface.
In my book I explain the use of bits and bytes by using a shift register SN74HC595 IC and 5101AS LED number display.
To create some timeline images for my book, I created this little JavaFX application to be able to easily update the content and recreate the image. Of course you can do the same in an image editor, but hey I’m a programmer and lazy, so I want a program to do the job for me ;-)
Using the Java library I created (see previous post), it was a piece of cake to create a JavaFX UI on top of it!
Next step in my book progress, is getting more into the details of hardware components. And as always starting with the smallest most-used ones: resistors!
To be able to fully document this for the book and create a demo application, I started again with creating and sharing a Java library.
One of the example applications in my book “Getting started with Java on the Raspberry Pi” combines a JavaFX application with Mosquitto on the Raspberry Pi to control a LED strip with an Arduino. All wireless and independent of each other as the Mosquitto-queue is dealing with exchange commands between all applications.
My very first open source JavaFX library is now available in the Maven repository! A small step for mankind, one giant leap for myself ;-)
While trying out what Pi4J can do, I found it could easily be extended with a JavaFX application to provide info about the headers on a Pi board. This could later be extended to a remote/local (touch) User Interface using the REST interface from this post.
As my daily work mainly is Java and back-end stuff on “real servers”, I set myself for 2019 as a personal goal to experiment with Java 11 on a Raspberry PI.
Based on the previous blog posts
So there is one “small” step remaining: build something which actually does something on the PI, talking to the GPIO’s and show what’s happening.
Spoiler alert: this is what’s is going to look like:
In part 2 of this blog series Java 11 was successfully installed on a PI.
I prefer a Java app above a web app, because starting a new “modern” web development requires you to pull a bunch of dependencies and a lot of files before you can start. While Java just needs the JDK and one Java file, even on a Raspberry PI (as described in PiJava - Part 2).
From the Oracle site: “JavaFX is a set of graphics and media packages that enables developers to design, create, test, debug, and deploy rich client applications that operate consistently across diverse platforms.”
Is Java your first programming language and do you want to get up and running fast? Or maybe you are already an experienced programmer in another language and want to give Java a try?
For sale as ebook on Leanpub, with continuous free updates!
When I first managed to blink a LED connected to a Raspberry Pi with Java, I was super excited!