Eskil, one of my students, provided me with information about how to deploy the JavaFX AddressApp on Mac OS.

I’ve updated the AddressApp Tutorial Part VII with instructions about JavaFX deployment for Mac.

To see how the end result will look like you can download it as a Mac OS dmg drag-and-drop installer: AddressApp.dmg

Thank you Eskil for providing this!

I’m excited about the quick reaction to bug reports by the JavaFX developers at Oracle! I’ve reported an (annoying) Scene Builder bug at the end of November and it was already fixed in a new Scene Builder version in January.

Scene Builder Update

The Scene Builder bug forced us to delete and then reselect the controller class every time we reopened a fxml file in Scene Builder. This is fixed in Scene Builder 1.1 beta 17 and above. So I recommend you update to the newest version:

As JavaFX 2.2 doesn’t contain a Calendar control we would have to create our own to provide a convenient way to enter a date. Fortunately, Christian Schudt has created a very nice DatePicker that we can use:

JavaFX 2.2 and above provides a convenient snapshot feature. It takes a snapshot of any node or scene.

The following method saves the barChart node as a png image:

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@FXML
public void saveAsPng() {
  WritableImage image = barChart.snapshot(new SnapshotParameters(), null);
  
  // TODO: probably use a file chooser here
  File file = new File("chart.png");
  
    try {
        ImageIO.write(SwingFXUtils.fromFXImage(image, null), "png", file);
    } catch (IOException e) {
      // TODO: handle exception here
    }
}

Note: You could test this code with our AddressApp example (see download at the end of AddressApp Tutorial Part VII). Just add the saveAsPng() method to the BirthdayStatisticsController class and call the method through some action (e.g. a new button).

Very often in JavaFX we have to react to user events: The user clicks a button, presses a key, moves the mouse, etc. This post describes how to handle such events.

We’ll try to do as much event handling with Scene Builder and fxml as possible. For some events we’ll add event handling in the Java code of the controller.

Our example covers some of the most used events on common JavaFX 2 controls:

In this post I will show how to customize the rendering of a JavaFX 2 TableView. The Birthday column in the screenshot below is a formatted Calendar object. Depending on the year, the text color is changed.

The JavaFX 2 TableView lacks the ability for filtering. The intention before JavaFX 2.0 shipped was to include a FilteredList that would wrap an ObservableList (see Oracle forum Filter rows on TableView). Unfortunately, the filtering was removed again. It will appear in JavaFX 8 which won’t be released before late 2013.

In this post I will explain how we can manually do row filtering in JavaFX 2.

I created two new pages to structure content on this website. The pages will guide you through the learning resources about Java and JavaFX:

• Learn Java - Java resources and blog posts
• Learn JavaFX - JavaFX resources and blog posts

Updated Feb 11th, 2013: New instructions for Deployment on Mac OS. Thank you Eskil for providing me with this information!

Updated May 22nd, 2013: Updated step 3 and step 4 for e(fx)clipse plugin version 0.8.1.

I thought I’d write one last part of this tutorial series to show how to deploy (i.e. package and publish) the AddressApp.

Download example AddressApp as

• Windows exe installer: AddressApp-0.7.exe.
• MacOS dmg drag-and-drop installer: AddressApp.dmg - Thank you Eskil for providing this!

Topics in Part VII

• Deploying our JavaFX application as Native Package with e(fx)clipse

This post is meant to assist students to tackle their first real Java project. It is a list of Java libraries with some tipps and helpful links to get started. I hope you’ll have some fun creating your own software.

Persisting Data

Almost every application will need some way to persistently store data. There are many different ways to accomplish that. We’ll start with a simple way to save a small amount of data and continue to more advanced techniques.