Under My Palapa

They said July, and here it is on the last day of July. My feeling is that this is probably rushed! The feature matrix with Networking & XML/JSON handling as not 1.0 features is a bit troubling. Not sure what that really means though. Most interesting will be the project Nile plugin for CS3. I’ll have to play with it and see how well it works.

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JavaFX is still undergoing changes. Hopefully the SDK & API will become solidified soon. Right now it is pretty bleeding edge, with incomplete Javadoc. Not a criticism, just the facts.

I wanted to see how hard it was to use the RemoteTextDocument API to pull in some sort of webservice feed. Turns out it is not so hard once you know how to do it. Since there appears to be no existing examples of this out there, here’s a snippet of code that could be useful.

import javafx.async.*;

var remoteTextDocument:RemoteTextDocument = RemoteTextDocument {
    url: "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne";
}

var doc:String = bind remoteTextDocument.document on replace {
    if (remoteTextDocument.done)
        java.lang.System.out.println("doc = {doc}");
}

All this does is immediately fetch the contents of the Flickr URL, and print it to the console. I would say this is pretty nice. I was able to incorporate the concept shown above into a small application that shows a thumbnail photo feed without a lot of code.

As of this post, this is only working with the nightly trunk build of the compiler. You’ll get a NegativeArraySizeException running it in Netbeans since their plugin is not being built off the trunk.

I have a corresponding post on the OpenJFX forums about this issue.

I’ve arranged to be able to blog some of the things I am working on, at least the ‘generic’ parts that don’t give away any company secrets. Hopefully I will be able to make a small contribution back to the developer community with this blog. It will probably be a mix of JavaFX, Adobe Flex, and in my off hours, Cocoa and Objective-C.