Today I pushed the fourth rerelease of my JavaFX Plugin for Gradle to bintray, version 0.3.0 (real software engineers count from zero). New in this release is the ability to specify a particular JVM to package with your native bundles and the ability to customize platform-specific build options. Some configuration options and conventions also moved around to support these two features, most notably the plugin no longer automatically self-signs the code.

To use the plugin in your gradle script, you can apply the plugin from the following URL:

apply from: "http://dl.bintray.com/content/shemnon/javafx-gradle/0.3.0/javafx.plugin"

Or, you can include the content of that file anywhere in your build, either directly in build.gradle or included from your file path.

A few weeks ago my day job bought me a Surface Pro to help me prototype some future product work. Being a developer, you could probably guess the kind of software I installed on it. For the record I have yet to attempt to use stuff like the Finance and Travel App, and only opened the Maps app out of idle curiosity. The first thing I did was install JDK 8 and IntelliJ, so I could get down to business: figuring out how to best use touch screens and gestures.

The 0.2.0 release of the Gradle JavaFX Plugin is now live on BinTray. Get it while it’s hot! More things changed in this release than the lat time around. First there has been a lot of work automating the use of icons in the packaged resource. My previous post has all the details. Second, the interaction between the Maven and Eclipse plugin has been improved. Finally, the distribution has move to BinTray for the release artifacts.

The 0.2.0 release of the Gradle JavaFX Plugin is just around the corner. I want to spend some time building all the samples on all of the platforms and making sure smoke doesn’t come out. Expect it in a day or two.

The major feature for this release is better handling of packaged icons across the platforms. There is a file convention manner and a build script configuration method that will allow you to take a set of PNG images and let the build tool create the needed specialty file for each platform.

I just spun and released the 0.1.0 version of my JavaFX Gradle plugin. There is only one new feature: ScenicView integration. The rest is behind the scenes work where I am moving away from the Ant tasks. I also updated some of the web scripts to launch it.

This is a quick update on my mirrors of OpenJFX on BitBucket. I’ve moved some stuff around and automated it a bit. I am also retiring my “combined” repo that would merge the master, graphics, and controls scrums together. It got messy with multiple heads and bookmarks, and given the weekly merging the two scrums do wasn’t really adding any value.

One of the newer features for JavaFX is the new TextFlow node. Revealed at JavaOne San Francisco this is the generel solution to a rich text component in JavaFX.

This also happens to fit in nicely with my planned hobby project for the next few months. The deck control was one part, and the ability to take MarkDown into a JavaFX node is another important part of the equation. To prototype this I wrote a little toy app I call FlowDown

While I really like the Scenic View application that Jasper, Richard, and Jonathan have put together I do have to say getting it working is a bit of a struggle. But like most things I wind up blogging about this is something that can be fixed with a little bit of magical Gradle dust.

I haven’t’ done much to promote it yet, but I feel I have written enough to announce that I have written a JavaFX 2.0 Plugin for Gradle. Better documentation will follow, but this is the announcement getting it out there, After all this is just an oh dot oh dot oh.

Real Computer Scientists Count from Zero

Why the 0.0.0 release? Well, real computer scientists count from zero. The vending machines in the computer science building at my university started with zero on the left, then one and two and so on. And when software is released the ‘oh dots’ precede the ‘one dot oh’, clearly establishing that the digit on the right should be zero. So why are first releases 0.1 or 0.0.1? It’s not the second release, it’s the first release! So start at the first index: Zero! Why three numbers? I blame OSGi. And blame is the correct word, not credit.

Creating an app in any new framework can sometimes be a bit of a chore. Have you looked at the files that come form a new Hello World JavaFX app from NetBeans? Not very dry at all and a lot of esoteric stuff in side directories is created, you know just in case you want to customize it. And the problem isn’t NetBeans, they are doing the best they can with Ant.

The Ideal Build

To me the ideal build setup for a JavaFX application would involve putting your source files in a specific directory layout, placing supporting files in a similarly conventional manner, adding a minimal build script, pressing a button, and catching my .app or .exe as it falls out the other side.