Jada jada JavaFX – Why I Love the Idea

The other day I held a three-hour workshop, an introduction to JavaFX for some colleagues. The great thing about doing it, is that it forced me to answer the question: why is it necessary to create a new language just for GUI?

I brought a screenshot from a sprint demo with me as an example of why we need to go beyond the current widget based thinking. The example was a table that presented opening hours per sales item. During the demo it became clear how hard it was to understand the concept from the GUI. It did not show through, so to speak.

Standard widgets like tables and buttons are not sufficient to represent all kinds of information. The more advanced systems we build, the more power we give our users, the better we have to be at finding new ways of constructing user interfaces.

JavaFX is a promise of possibilities but you still have to think for yourself if you want to go further than adding a drop shadow and glow effect to your menues. Challenge your creativity!

Anyway, here are the slides from the presentation. There are four parts of about a dozen slides each. There is an introduction and three independent tracks that ends with a programming exercise. In three hours, there was time for only one of the three. This time, the audience selected the ball game, probably due to that the week before, the HTML5 presentation had a ball game as example. Needless to say JavaFX kicks ass compared to an HTML canvas. 🙂

Besides the ball game exercise, there is a simple button example and an example on using Inkscape with JavaFX showing how to set the identity on objects.

The Introduction. The ball game. Inkscape Example. The Button Example.

 

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