My Third JavaFX Application
I’ve been spending some time getting familiar with JavaFX as a way of writing rich, immersive applications that, unlike other platforms, can be used on both Windows and MacOS desktops as well as mobile, web browser, and (some day soon) TV. I’m not a seasoned Java programmer but I can get the job done, though I always found building application user interfaces to be slow going. JavaFX, especially the JavaFX Script programming language, makes creating highly stylized and animated user interfaces easy, especially when used through the Netbeans interactive development environment (IDE).
My first attempt at JavaFX was simple and not even interactive — a countdown timer that ran on my desktop and told me long it would be until some important event (usually either our annual JavaOne conference or a big product launch). That went well so I built as application #2 a basic Twitter client to learn more about application elements such as data entry, interaction with a web service (twitter.com), parsing XML, and manipulating images. I used that app as my regular twitter client for several months until I met Steven Herod and became aware of his excellent and far more fully featured TwitterFX client.
I wanted my third JavaFX app to be something similarly useful on a day-to-day basis, and which also would let me experiment with the JavaFX developer phone (an HTC Touch Diamond) I acquired at JavaOne 2009. I settled on a world clock, which I definitely needed to help me keep track of my work colleagues and friends in Boston, London, St. Petersburg, Seoul, Hobart and elsewhere.
The result, which you see at the beginning of this post, is an application I call “Now”. I’ve been using it as a regular component of my Mac laptop and Windows home desktop for several months. Building it has taught me quite a few things, which I’m going to explore here in a series of upcoming posts.
