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I seem to be having a slow week. Perhaps a  good weekend is need to restore the energy levels. I have been fiddling with JavaFX and written some little bits of code. Well mostly following some tutorials. Using the JavaFXPad or the Netbeans plug in is great as it quite literally gives instant feed back displaying the results as you type. So if you add a button to you frame it appears a second layer in the preview screen. Real interactive programming at work in a way that say python and idle never really seem to provide.

It contains some interesting concepts and the declarative nature of the Gui design really simplifies this area of programming. The whole bind idea and triggers seem like a reasonable idea, apparently the concept come from the world of databases but as I know little about this area of computing they are a fairly new concept to me.

In some ways it seems to remind me of the programming language AMOS that existed on the Amiga a long time ago. Not that the languages have any similarities more the feel you get when programming with it. Code seems to be quite short for what you can do and the concept of the triggers and the dur operator to set up autonomous animation remind me of the AMAL (AMos  Animation Language). Again they were implemented differently but for some reason I am reminded of it in a set things up an let them run in an independent way. Ok I am probably show my age here talking about this sort of thing and most people won’t even know what I talking about.

I guess I need to write some simple demos without following a tutorial and figure out any rough edges JavaFX. It seems like a nice language so far.

I spent about an hour over lunch reading up on the JavaFx scripting language to get a feel for what they
are trying to do with it. It seems to be an efficient way of writing GUI’s particularly ones that
require lots of cool effects, that is it works really well with Java2D to make custom stuff very easy.
Its seem to do away with a lot of the infrastructure such as custom events and listeners which should
give a reasonable increase in productivity.

Down sides is it is not ready yet and does apparently have some performance issues as it is currently interpreted
rather then compiled straight to the JVM. A compiler is in the works, should be released reasonable soon, and
gives the factor of 10 to 50 speed increase the compilers usually give over interpreters.

JavaFX moves over to a declarative model for creating gui’s meaning it does away with a lot of the binding code
for adding buttons to frames making the code easier to read. Listeners seem to be replaced with the bind
keyword that lets you bind properties of the gui to variables. I realise I am not going to explain this that
well as I don’t want to repeat what is mentioned in various on-line tutorials. Suffice to say Gui’s look pretty
easy to create and if you want to know more search engines are you friends.

JavaFX seems to be aimed everywhere, for desktop, web and mobile applications, which is as it should be. It
would be nice if sun could manage to get a competitor to the latest Flash/Action script and Microsofts Silverlight
thingy going on as more competition is good. Although that would mean making the JRE way easier to install.

As with all new technologies you really have to try it out and that is not something I have done. It is certainly
on the list as anything that makes GUI programming quicker is a good thing in my book. I am not a fan of creating
GUI’s but they are a necessary evil these days!

Ok here is a quick update to fix the the loading and saving of files, err oops on that. It was a simple mistake but I think I will be adding some unit tests on the load/save code before the next release. I would have done it this time but it was such a simple mistake I wanted to make it available straight away.

The more observant will notice you also get a warning message if you try to open a new file without saving the old one. It may be a little rough as I am still testing it. I am afraid I was a little lazy with creating a new branch in my svn repository so the bug fix was done in the main branch along with the development of the next release.

I have created a new page on this website so the sound synth program has a place to live. Use the link in the top menu to get at it.

A couple of evenings fiddling around with Ant and I now have a one click release process. Well one line to type on a CLI but that is one click for me. Had a frustrating hour or so trying to use the NetBeans generated ant files to build from the command line (which is easy) but also selecting the configuration to build. Totally gave up on that approach and rolled my own ant script to build the the whole program, do the whole jar signing process then upload it.

I will be hosting the download on marblemice.com from now on so here is the latest link to get the webstartable version. MarbleMist is due to expire sometime next week and there isn’t really any need to renew it as does not really contain much that cant be put on MarbleMice.

Well the other rounding issues actually took about 10 minutes while drinking a cup of RedBush tea and taking in a little bit of trash TV.

I then move on to adding a couple of extra features. The main one being clicking on the generated sample display cause the generated sample to play. It meant a return to messing around with swing. I am pleased to say I appear to be finally getting swing and the Netbeans GUI builder. In fact I would go so far to say that not having used it for a little while has lets its ideas seep into my mind and some of it has started to become obvious. I also make the cursor change to a little hand when the mouse if over the area to click – just to give the user a hint. It sure saves quite a bit of time clicking that rather than going up to the tool bar to play the sample. I guess I need a keyboard short cut really. that would probably take less time to implement than writing this blog post given my new found ninja swing skills.

I am debating what to do next, I have a whole load of incremental features to add so there is no shortage of things to do but also in the back of my mind is I really need to sort out my release system. Currently it is pretty manual and ideally it should be the click of a button to get a new release up to the site. I know I mentioned this before but only spent a little time messing around with Ant trying to figure out how to build a netbeans project from the command line. Obviously it would be great to get push up a new build every week or so rather than every month or two. Perhaps it is time to pick up wrestle with Ant again and see what I can mash up.