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I just released a new version of the RadioFX widget that is able to play SHOUTcast urls (.pls).
So this should make the collection of radio stations playable through the widget a lot bigger!

Enjoy and if you have a request, don’t hesitate to contact me!

Yannick

After ending 2nd in the WidgetFX contest, I’d like to share my experiences about using WidgetFX with you.

To be honest, I only created my RadioFX widget one week before the deadline of the contest. I had thought about entering the contest before but I just couldn’t come up with a good idea for a widget that would be useful for a lot of people and not just me as a developer. But as I was creating another JavaFX application that would be able to display information from a Belgian radiostation’s webservice, I thought about how easy it would be to have a small application that would allow me to keep all my urls to various webradios in one place and avoid opening a browser for playback. And that’s when I realized that this would be a good scenario for a widget. So one week before the deadline I started to work on my RadioFX widget during the evenings. This shows that JavaFX allows for pretty fast application development because with little time you can still make cool things!

The features I like most about the WidgetFX framework:

• How easily it allows you to create a widget and save information.
• Sharing your widget with the rest of the world.
• It runs on multiple platforms.

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I’m proud to announce that I got 2nd in the WidgetFX contest which means I win 3 books from APress.
The widget I submitted was the RadioFX widget about which you can read more on the widget page of this blog.

First I would like to to congratulate the winner Pär Dahlberg on his very cool ScreenshotFX widget and Larry Dickson on his Infix WeatherWidget!
You can read all about it in Stephen Chin’s post on his blog. I think we all owe a special thanks to Stephen for creating the WidgetFX framework, the contest and all the time and effort he puts into JavaFX through WidgetFX and JFXtras.

Thank you Stephen!

Just wanted to share the link to a really interesting article that helped me better understand the layout principles used in JavaFX:

JavaFX 1.2: Layout by Amy Fowler

Enjoy!

Today I found out about a small difference between JavaFX and Java… Small, but it can be annoying if you’re – like me – a Java developer.

The == operator in Java is used to compare if two objects are actually the same instance. To check if the are considered equal (logically), you  use .equals().

In JavaFX apparently, it’s the other way around !
== checks for logical equality and .isSameObject() is used to see if two objects are the same instance.

I’ll try and remember it, but I’m sure that i’ll make some mistakes before doing it correctly … and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only JavaFX developer with a Java background who’ll have problems with it …

I just uploaded my RadioFX widget to this page, you can find all the info here.

This widget will also be submitted for the WidgetFX contest.

Hope you enjoy it!

Just to announce that my ManualResizableRecangle component has been commited to the JFXtras repository and will be available in the next version of this great library!

For a webradio client I’m writing, I wanted to play an mp3 stream.

The following code plays an online mp3 file without any problems but refused to play the infinite mp3 stream:

 player = MediaPlayer {

            media : Media { 
                source: streamUrl

            }

        }

        player.play();

After spending some time on google looking for the result, I came across a solution in Java that uses the Javazoom JLayer player to process the mp3 stream.

While I was implementing this, a colleague came up with a much better solution… Just set the repeatCount property of the javafx MediaPlayer to “REPEAT_FOREVER” and it will play an infinite mp3 stream. I never thought of this myself because it looked logical to me that this property is just used to identify how many times you want to play a certain audio file. But anyway, it works great now and makes it really easy to create a webradio client.

So the final code is:

 player = MediaPlayer {
    
            repeatCount: MediaPlayer.REPEAT_FOREVER 

    
            media : Media { 

    
                source: streamUrl 

    
            } 

    
        } 

    
        player.play();

Today I finished my first custom component in JavaFX!

For a personal project I’m going to develop, I could use a rectangle that can be manually resized in the horizontal direction. To do things the right way from the start I created the ManualResizableRectangle component.

It’s a normal Rectangle with the following extra features:

• resizable in horizontal and vertical direction
• the resizing can be enabled or disabled in both directions separately
• a maximum and minimum size can be specified so the user can’t make it too large or too small
• the rectangle can be moved around if this feature is enabled
• a stepsize can be specified to make sure the rectangle is resized in certain steps (can be useful if you want to use it in let’s say a calendar component)
• the width of the area used to resize can be configured

You can try it out here.
The source code can be found here.

How did I create it?

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I just started reading my very first JavaFX book:

I can’t really say much about it yet but for the small part i’ve read, it’s looks promising. The writing style is not too heavy with a lot of examples and very important: it covers JavaFX 1.2! When I finish reading it, I’ll definitely put a small review on this blog.

Another book on my reading list is Pro JavaFX Platform.