Jasper Potts

Parleys.com has posted the first of our JavaFX talks from Devoxx 2008. You can watch it here or as a bigger version on Parleys.com. This talk is the 1 hour version covering the JavaFX Language, Scene Graph and Animation presented by Richard Bair and Martin Brehovsky, I bailed on helping present this one as I had been up most of the night working on “Devoxx Themed Swish Demo”. Its well worth watching and should take you from knowing nothing about JavaFX to being able to build a cool little application. Even if you are already using JavaFX you may learn some handy new snippets. This is the one hour version of the talk that I gave the slides and demo for in Introduction to JavaFX Talks – Devoxx 2008 – IJTC 2009.

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Following on from the success of the JavaFX Devoxx animations Stephan Janssen asked if I could do a similar video to replace last years intro video that is played before the start of each of the recorded sessions. I decided this was another chance to see how JavaFX copes with animation. This time I needed a 10-15second clip of PAL video 768×576 25fps. In this blog I will explain how I created this animation and take you though recreating it step by step. I started out creating the graphics in Photoshop based on the ones I had from the Devoxx theme for Swish with all the parts that I am going to need to animate as separate layers. All the layers I want to access from JavaFX are named with the “jfx:” prefix and simple camel case names so they will be exposed to JavaFX code and come though as neat variable names.

Complete Graphics

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During Devoxx 2008 we were preparing demos for the JavaFX Keynote including a demo for JavaFX Production Suite called Swish. Swish is a demo where we take a photoshop file of graphics and an Illustrator file with animation paths and put together a small animation using those resources in JavaFX. Then we can take a new set of graphics and paths and swap them out with the same code and get a completely new look for the animation. You can watch the standard version of the Swish demo on the  JavaFX Videos page on the video called “Designer-Developer Workflow”.

The original graphics

The alternative graphics

At Devoxx Danny Coward asked if we could tweak the graphics and add a Devoxx logo or similar. I asked Stephan Janssen if he could send me some of the Devoxx graphics and he sent me the graphics that were being projected behind the speaker and slides on the big screens. As I am a perfectionist and can never do the simple thing I spent some of the day before the keynote creating a complete Devoxx theme for the Swish demo.

Devoxx themed graphics

When I showed the graphics to Stephan Janssen he said half joking (I think!) wouldn’t it be cool if we could replace the graphics behind the slides and speaker with this animation. After some discussions we worked out that if I could create a full HD video loop 1920×1080 then they had the technology to project that on the big cinema screens. So not to be one to let a challenge go by I created a full HD version of the graphics and we ran the JavaFX application on Martin’s MacBook Pro as it was the only machine we had access to with full HD resolution screen. We then screen recorded it and spent the rest of the night creating and encoding a video loop. So while everyone was walking into the room and during the performances by the Beatboxer Roxorloops our video was playing on the big screen.

Devoxx animation of big screen

It was a whole pile of fun so maybe next year Stephan can arrange a machine which we can install JavaFX and have animated backgrounds for all the talks. I think we were all impressed that JavaFX could pull off full HD animation, makes me want to write a video titling tool in JavaFX

Over the last couple months Richard Bair, Martin Brehovsky and I presented talks introducing JavaFX at Devoxx 2008, Sun Paris Tech Day and IJTC 2009 (Irish Java Technologies Conference). There are 2 versions a longer one for Devoxx and a more condensed version for Paris and IJTC. For those of you interested here are the slides and demos:

Slides

Devoxx Slides PDF

IJTC Slides PDF

Demo

During the talks we built up a simple demo with what you learn in each section.

Here are the links so you can webstart the demos for the different sections, I started at Demo 2d as that is the first version with working close button which is always helpful

Here is the Netbeans project and source files for these demos so you can play with them.

Netbeans-Project.zip

I am just reviewing the submissions for JavaOne 2009 and was looking back at what we did for JavaOne 2008 and noticed Sun has posted the slides with audio from our session on Nimbus last year. So if you are interested in Nimbus and were not fortunate enough to be able to come and see us in person or have listened to it already. Then it is well worth checking out as I think we made a good attempt to explain how Nimbus works and how to use it. 

Nimbus: The New Face of Swing TS-6096

Presenter: Richard Bair, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Jasper Potts, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Nimbus is the stunning next-generation cross-platform look-and-feel for the Java platform, perfect for skinning Swing components in existing applications and new FX applications. In this session, two Nimbus developers guide you through using Nimbus to create beautiful modern applications. They cover the basics of using Nimbus in your Swing applications and also discuss using the new Nimbus Designer visual design tool for extending Nimbus and styling custom components. Finally, they show how to brand your applications with completely custom look-and-feels extending Nimbus.