I have just uploaded a second screencast (embedded below) in the "JavaFX on Griffon" series. If you missed the first screencast, you can find it here. This screencast concludes the basic introduction I wanted to provide to writing JavaFX applications with Griffon.
In my previous article, I was remiss in forgetting to thank Andres Almiray, the leader of the Giffon project, for all his help in creating these plugins. I am thoroughly convinced that Andres spent about twice as much time answering all of my silly questions as it would have taken him to just write the plugins himself.
So Mr. Almiray, thank you for all the time you spent teaching me about Griffon plugins and the Griffon build system. You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman!
I'm really happy to share one of the side projects I've been working on for a while now. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have seen images of this in the past, but now I'm finally able to open up the sandbox and let others play.
I have posted a screencast on YouTube that shows how to get started with Griffon, GroovyFX, and JavaFX. I hope you will agree that it is a really fun and easy combination for writing Java desktop clients. If you are ready to try it out for yourself, the archetype I used in the video can be downloaded from my GitHub page. The screencast is embedded below, broken into two parts since it is a little on the lengthy side.
In other GroovyFX news, Jim Clarke and I will be doing an in-depth technical session on GroovyFX at JavaOne. The session will be the last session of the day on Thursday. It's titled "GroovyFX: JavaFX is my bag, baby, yeah!" This session will also touch on using GroovyFX with Griffon so I hope you can squeeze it into your busy JavaOne schedule!
Jim and I have also been busy adding more features to GroovyFX. I hope to post a new article soon describing new features like IDEA code completion and improved event declarations. There is so much Groovy JavaFX stuff to talk about!
Update: The next screencast in this series is now available. This screencast goes into more binding functionality and discusses event handling in JavaFX Griffon applications.
Working with the recent early access release of JavaFX 2.0 has been interesting. On one hand, the scene graph API you know and love translates surprisingly well to Java. The team at Oracle has done a nice job of keeping the new API simple to use. The animation support still makes it easy to do the simple things, and possible to do the sophisticated. The memory overhead is down while performance is up. All good.
There are definitely places where JavaFX Script (now Visage) is missed. Binding, object literals, functional programming, and easy internationalization were all particularly useful language features. To make up for this loss, you can now use all of the old, familiar Java tools to write JavaFX including all of the awesome testing libraries and IDEs that Java is known for. In my opinion, this more than makes up for the loss of the awesomeness that was the JavaFX Script syntactic sugar.
You can always add some of that sweetness back in by using one of the many great JVM languages at our disposal. My weapon of choice happens to be Groovy and I can tell you that Groovy and JavaFX are a potent combination. Apparently Groovy is a terrific language for expressing application frameworks as it boasts two of the best in the Java world: Grails for web applications and Griffon for desktop applications.
Yesterday I decided to take a quick look at what would be involved in creating a JavaFX application plugin for Griffon. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. Griffon's architecture is clean and the documentation was great. It took me a lot longer than it should have just because I was enjoying looking around under Griffon's hood.
A video showing the results of my little experiment is embedded below.
I plan to continue developing this plugin with the ultimate goal being first-class Griffon support for JavaFX applications when JavaFX 2.0 ships later this fall.
The JavaFX team at Oracle has a lot of work ahead of them. There are some missing features and some rough edges, but this Early Access release is a great start. I can't wait to see the finished product.
