The new JavaFX Scene Builder graphical tool for editing FXML has been released.

You can read the announcement here: http://fxexperience.com/2012/04/announcing-javafx-scene-builder-public-beta/

There is a download here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/downloads/devpreview-1429449.html#sb

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In case you haven’t heard, JavaFX 2 is the new Desktop / web / client framework for Java. It’s had a considerable overhaul since JavaFX 1 (which was frankly not that impressive). Out has gone the custom scripting language, and instead you can write it using standard Java and an XML-based language for the actual UI presentation.

So today, a friend and I got together at one of our places to teach ourselves a bit of JavaFX. Here’s what we learned, starting with some of the yak-shaving we had to do:

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Hi All,  (this post is x-posted from Martijn’s personal blog and the ljc blog)

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Manipulating Files in Java 7

The following is a modified snippet from a draft of The Well-Grounded Java Developer. It gives you a quick taster of how much easier it is to manipulate files in Java 7 than in previous versions. By using the new Files class and its many utility methods, you can perform the following operations on files with only a single line of code:

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The discussion on the lambda-dev mailing list has started to address the issue of what the Java language syntax for lambdas / function literals ought to look like. Let’s look at a slightly non-trivial example and try to tease the issues out.

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As many of you will have heard, Ben will be representing the London Java Community as a nominee for one of the open seats on the Java SE/EE executive committee!

This is a great opportunity for a Java User Group to have a direct say in the future of Java 8, 9 and the overall ecosystem. I know Ben will be a great representative for the LJC and for all Java developers around the world.

The LJC is trying to get all questions/responses in one place, so for more more details see http://bit.ly/mEv7YQ

Cheers,
Martijn

The interview is live here

Ben Evans and I recently spoke at the Scandinavian Developers Conference on Java 7 and polyglot programming on the JVM. We also had a fun afternoon on a panel discussing “Whether the community or the corporations will control Java in the future”. That discussion probably deserves it own blog post, but more interestingly we spent a long time talking to Henrik Stahl from Oracle.

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Hopefully, by now, everyone knows that Apple joined the OpenJDK project last year. What does that mean?

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Quite a significant milestone today – The change request to switch on Java 7′s MethodHandle and invokedynamic features by default is in. Once this propagates into the OpenJDK repositories, we will see one of the largest features of Java 7 finally land ready for use.

The details of the CR are here.

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If you have recently been following Project Coin’s mailing list , you will have spotted an interesting discussion regarding the inclusion of lock management inside the scope of a try-with-resources (TWR) code block.

The Initial Idea

The idea was initiated by Gernot Neppert who proposed a class java.util.concurrent.AutoLockable which would implement AutoCloseable, and therefore be eligible for usage with TWR:

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One of the most interesting things about the development of Java 7 has been the open debate around language features.

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Martijn and I are at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Caesar’s Palace this week.

We’re at this afternoon’s Meet The Authors session, and we have talks tomorrow (Back to the Future with Java 7) and Martijn’s Diabolical Developer talk on Friday.

If you’re around, do come and say Hi.

I've always wanted to write a post which had that as the title.

Sharp practices abound in this world, and one of the most disturbing aspects to them is the extent to which the media (and people in general) uncritically repeat "information" or "news" that is really just a press release by a commercial interest.

So, I was pleased to see the launch of Churnalism (http://churnalism.com/), a website where you can cut and paste the text of a news "story" and see how much of it was pulled, verbatim, from a press release.

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MethodHandles are covered in full in our The Well-Grounded Java Developer title

Due to Java’s Reflection API we have been able to inspect and alter program execution at runtime. In particular, we can observe interfaces/classes/methods and fields at runtime without knowing their names at compile time.

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