Desktop Java

There was a mixture of feelings about the decoupling of JavaFX from JDK after its 11th release. Many of us felt that now this is the time to say goodbye to JavaFX and switch to another GUI technology, While some others were happy about this circumstance. They believed that decoupling JavaFX from the hands of the Oracle and pursuing its development ...

I have a big update for JMetro this time. Version 3.8 brings the following new Fluent Design (FDS) inspired styles (dark and light) and updates: New Radio Button style; New style for Check Box; New style for Menus; Updated style for Context Menu; New style for Choice Box. JMetro new version details I decided to, for now, switch focus off on ...

I’ve just released a new update for JMetro, bumping the version up to 3.3.0. In this update you’ll find: New TreeView Fluent Design System (‘Metro’) inspired style; New Tabs and TabPane FDS inspired style; New Context Menu dark FDS inspired style and retouch of light style. JMetro version 3.3.0 details TreeView JMetro style The following animations show the new TreeView ...

Selection Strip I recently had to implement a custom control that lets the user select a single item out of a list of items. This “SelectionStrip” control had to lay out the items horizontally and in case of too many items allow the user to scroll horizontally left and right. The control was to be used in a space-constrained area, ...

Hi again, this time the TableView “Metro” style gets added to the JMetro JavaFX theme. This amps up the JMetro version to 3.1.0. The reason why I didn’t add the Table style before is because strangely there isn’t yet a definition for the Table in the Fluent Design System (previously Metro). There is a preview control, called DataGrid but is ...

In one of my projects I recently noticed that it was hard for the user to see whether the content of a ScrollPane instance was currently scrolled or not. One way of making this more clear is to add a drop shadow to the top of the scroll pane. This is also something suggested by Google’s Material Design. So I ...

Back in the days when I was still implementing UIs in Swing I used to be a big fan of MigLayout (“one layout manager to rule them all”, right Mikael?). One of the features I really liked was the possibility to define different behaviors when a component became invisible. MigLayout allowed me to either preserve the space that the now ...

To understand what’s wrong with Java desktop apps, let’s take a look at the new features of JavaFX, a leading UI framework for desktop applications. It becomes obvious that it is trending towards the web approaches, borrowing more and more features from the web world. JavaFX supports a subset of CSS features, accompanying it with their own properties. However, this ...

Introduction Reactive programming’s popularity has tremendously grown over the last 4 or 5 years. This can tell us that the use case of reactive applications is now valid more than ever. The strain on backend systems has increased and accordingly the need to handle this strain with minimal resources. Reactive programming is seen as a way to increase efficiency and ...