I attended Devoxx formally JavaPolis this year for the first time and had a truly brilliant experience. Probably worked the hardest I ever have in my life with about 4 hours of sleep a night for a week and non-stop between, but was also hugely enjoyable. It was great to have a chance to show JavaFX and feel the excitement we were generating around it. I finally got a chance to step back from the nitty details and try using it as a developer and see all the good points rather than the amount of work I still need to do to make everything perfect. Oh the pain of being a perfectionist 🙂 . As well as talking in several sessions on JavaFX and demoing in the keynote I got the chance to build a couple of applications in FX during the week. It was fun to see just how fast you can put cool looking apps together in FX:

• Little image viewer app for our Java FX University session, I will post the source for this soon.
  
• We had a demo called “Swish” which we were going to show during the JavaFX keynote at Devoxx, someone suggested would it not be cool if we could create a Devoxx themed version of it, expecting a logo somewhere or something like that. Well it gave me a chance to put the JavaFX Production Suite through its paces and see what we could do. So a few hours later we had a full Devoxx themed version. The swish demo takes a bunch of graphics created in Photoshop along with animation paths drawn in Illustrator and animates them to make a cool little visual demo. The cool thing is you can take completely new graphics files as long as they follow the same basic form and create a completely new version of the application with no code changes needed.
  
• After showing Stephan Janssen he suggested how cool it would be if we could replace the full backdrop behind the slides on the cinema screen. So a  second minimal version of Devoxx Swish in full 1080p HD was born which was projected on the full Cinema screen while people were entering/exiting the keynote and when the Beatbox artist Roxorloops was performing.
  
• Next I got asked if we could put together a little application for the Sun Booth to select prize winners from a text file of names, so a couple of hours later we had it up and running spinning and zooming random names when the mouse was clicked.
  
  Seemed to draw quite a crowd, or maybe it was just the cool prizes and free beer! 🙂
  
• When I was creating the prize draw application I needed to work out the Spline interpreter numbers to make the names thud down. I ended up using Romain Guy’s Spline Editor for Swing which makes it nice and easy. So thought it was about time we had a JavaFX version, and it could not be too hard. So a couple hours and a couple hundred bind statements later we have a very cool little Spline Editor that lets you edit the spline and see the effect in real time then copy the code to paste into your JavaFX application.
  
  If you would like to try it for your self click here:  you can also download the source Netbeans project.

I hope all of you who attended Devoxx this year had as much fun as I did and all of you who did not attend you really missed something great and hope to see you all there next year. I will be posting all the slides to our sessions here very soon. All the sessions were recorded and will be posted on www.parleys.com at some point next year.