Recently at work we faced the need of implementing a user interface that delivered similar features as the ones exposed by Java Swing’s JDesktopPane but for JavaFX. Unfortunately JavaFX does not provide such component out of the box, nor do the most common JavaFX controls projects out there. There are however a few attempts to put something together but most never left the prototype stage or have been abandoned. That’s how I found JavaFXMDI, which seemed to have the right approach but was left unattended for close to 3 years. Fortunately the code was published as Open Source, thus after Read More
May Java be with You!
May was quite a hectic but fun month for me. The month began with a new state of mind as I found myself without a job albeit not for long as I’d join my next employer at the beginning of June, and though that was the plan all along I couldn’t shake the feeling of having to cut short a particular experience just to get back to work e-mails. Despite finding myself unemployed for a month I didn’t get much time to slack off as the next 5 weeks proved to be quite the ride round the globe (quite literally!) Read More
So long and thanks for all the fish
Today marks the last day of my adventures at Canoo Engineering AG. Back in 2010 Canoo celebrated it’s 10th year anniversary on April 1st with a full day event; that very same day I joined the company, which gave me the opportunity to meet pretty much everyone in one day. It’s been 8 years (plus 1 month) full of challenges and friendship; I had the opportunity to design from scratch the architecture of a systems platform used my a working group comprised of multi-national companies; helped migrate existing Java desktop solutions from Swing/SWT to JavaFX; coached teams on the intricacies Read More
Customize JAR manifest entries with Maven/Gradle
How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you can’t tell if the artifacts used by the application are the correct ones or not? How many times have you looked at a bug report stating that the problem is caused by version X of a particular artifact but you are certain the bug was fixed in said release? On closer inspection (after unpacking, debugging, even decompiling!) you find that the artifact in production is not the right one even though the version appears to be the correct one. One option we have to mitigate this problem is Read More
Maven scopes vs. Gradle configurations
WARNING: Information presented in this blog entry is outdated. Use of the compile & runtime configuration is no longer possible since Gradle 7. Other changes might have occurred since this blog entry was posted. Caveat emptor. Both Maven and Gradle are popular choices when it comes to building Java projects. These tools share common traits but there are some key differences that make you more productive depending on a particular scenario (no, I’m not referring to the XML DSL vs. Groovy/Kotlin DSL schism), case in point scopes vs. configurations. Scopes and configurations are used by each tool to define dependencies Read More
Contributing to JavaFX
Johan Vos (@johanvos) has setup a mirror of the official OpenJFX codebase as a repository at Github (https://github.com/openjdk/jfx. This repository allows anyone interested in contributing to JavaFX to be able to send patches to the project. Would you like to join the efforts to move JavaFX forward? These are the steps you must follow with the current pipeline: Have a Github account. It only takes a few minutes to setup and it’s free! Have a bug/feature in mind you’d like to see fixed/added to JavaFX. Browse the list of open issues at https://github.com/openjdk/jfx/issues to see if you can help; discussing Read More
2017 in Review
2017 has been a hectic year to say the least, however on the JVM side of things I’m quite happy with the results so far. We’ve got a brand new release of Java in September! The feature list added to Java9 is impressive, you can catch a glimpse of what’s new in Trisha’s (@trisha_gee) Real World Java 9 talk. Of course the elephant in the room when it comes to Java 9 is Jigsaw. Developers around the world are still trying to figure out how to get their tools and libraries to work with the new modular system, I recommend Read More
Become a patron
I’ve been working with Open Source code for more than 2 decades, first as a consumer then as an active producer. Working in Open Source has been a very rewarding experience, it has helped me hone my skills as a programmer, discover and learn quite a good number of programming languages (my favorite being Groovy in the JVM so far), interact with people all over the world. Alas writing and supporting Open Source takes time and effort. Most of the work I’ve done so far in this space has been done on my spare time, any related expenses have come Read More
First JCP EC face-to-face meeting in 2018
The JCP Executive Committee meets once a month to discuss topics of relevance to the Java platform and its community. Being a group of 25 members distributed around the world the preferred option for these meetings is the remote one, however the EC comes together 3 times a year to meet face-to-face, the first of these meetings just happened a few days ago at IBM’s campus in Hursley, UK. First day of the January #JCP EC meeting hosted by @IBM in Hursley pic.twitter.com/ZoUVpJn1mv — JCP (@jcp_org) January 30, 2018 This was my second meeting as part of the JCP EC Read More
The Road to BaselOne – Stop 9 – Basel
The final leg of the BaselOne tour began very early in the morning in Geneva as we prepared ourselves to visit CERN. We arrived just before staff, employees and visitors rushed into the place. We’d like to thank Manuel Álvarez and Pablo del Castro for organizing the visit and taking the time to explain us the mission, history, technical details and discoveries made by CERN. Our first stop was the workshop where the magnets arrive, get serviced and tested, then shipped to the tunnel. The following screenshot is of one of the test beds used to measure the performance of Read More