A JavaFX Visual Designer Tool Just Fell out of the Sky
Posted by: arunbluebrain on: December 19, 2008
Jeff Martin of ReportMill Software has been involved with the JavaFX community since the beginning. ReportMill has been working on a GUI builder tool for JavaFX named JFXBuilder, and has given the community a peek from time to time. Each time, I’ve kicked the tires a bit, but haven’t felt that it was ready for prime time.
Today on a JavaFX community mailing list, I received the following email from Jeff that began with:
“Hope nobody minds me posting this, since it’s free and “educational”. :-)
-jeff”
It was followed by the first portion of the JFXBuilder press release, which contains a Java Web Start link to JFXBuilder, and information such as the following:
“JFXBuilder is a desktop design and composition application for visually building JavaFX applications quickly, including the ability to:
- Perform drawing and illustration
- Add and edit rich text (fonts, colors, styles, wrapping, spelling, etc.)
- Apply advanced fills (textures and gradients)
- Apply advanced effects (shadow, reflection, emboss, glow, etc.)
- Apply advanced transforms (rotation, scale, skew)
- Drag and Drop images and other media
- Drag and Drop application components
- Apply Key-Frame based animation
- Apply path-based animation
- Apply Input-related behavior (Mouse-over, Mouse-down, etc.)
- Attach to a database or XML and perform data binding
- Design simple layouts for default JavaFX mobile devices
- Generate JavaFX code on the fly”
I decided to play with it a bit today, and was very impressed with its features. I’m excited about evaluating its ability to help build JavaFX applications, and would invite you to do the same. Here’s a screenshot of the tool at the point that it really started getting my attention, especially after the comment I made yesterday about desiring a library of JavaFX graphs:
As I dragged the mouse on the trackball shown above in the lower-right corner, the perspective of the 3D bar graph changed accordingly. I was not expecting that level of sophistication, given that JavaFX SDK 1.0 was released only two weeks ago.
I haven’t experimented much with JFXBuilder, and I don’t know anything about their licensing-related plans yet, but wanted to give you a heads-up that this looks seriously cool to me so far.
Jeff Martin or someone from ReportMill: If you read this, would you leaving a comment and/or link about your licensing-related plans for JFXBuilder?
Regards,
Jim Weaver
JavaFXpert.com
