O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Text plays a big part in user interfaces, yet string manipulation is remarkably primitive in popular programming languages. JavaFX Script, the new DSL for the JavaFX platform, has a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to playing with text.

Every now and again you hear mention of this strange new technology from the Java camp, called JavaFX. But what it is, and what makes it so different? Here's a handy bluffer's guide, to fool friends and colleagues into thinking you know what you're talking about.

Here are the results of a query on RIA job trends on indeed.com: One naturally has many questions about the data: what geographic area does it represent? How are duplicate postings handled? ... and so on, however the trend lines...

This poll was one that brought many votes and most of you don't feel that HTML 5 will be making any major impact any time soon. Over 40% of you voted for "I don't think so: HTML 5 doesn't touch...

HTML 5 has been the topic of buzz lately in the Internet/RIA world. With new features like Canvas, offline local storage, etc. many have been suggesting (including a recent article from infoworld) that HTML 5 could steal market share from...

In previous articles, we finished writing most of the code of the Pac-Man game. In article 3, we implemented a simple algorithm for the ghosts to catch the Pac-Man. The ghosts randomly decides in which direction they move. They do not chase the Pac-Man even they are very close to him. This makes the game less challenging. In fact, the behavior of the ghosts are the most tricky part of the game. According to Iwatani, the author of the original arcade game, he had designed each ghost with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming too difficult or boring to play. ( More info) However, there is generally no conclusion on what behavior of the ghosts are good for the players.

In the last article, we developed a preliminary version of the Pac-Man game. Four ghosts are randomly roaming the maze and a Pac-Man character can be controlled by a player. Now, we write some more code for the interaction between ghosts and the Pac-Man:

1. Pac-Man eats a ghost after he gobbles a magic dot.
2. A ghost eats the Pac-Man when it touches him.

We are now ready to create the ghosts in our game. The four ghosts, namely Blinky(red), Pinky(pink), Inky(cyan) and Clyde(orange), are trapped inside a cage when a game starts. After some time, they get out of the cage one by one and start roaming the maze. Their goal is to catch the Pac-Man. The Pac-Man dies if he is touched by one of the ghosts. If the Pac-Man swallows a magic dot, he has the power to eat ghosts for a while. During this time, the ghosts turn hollow and move more slowly.

In last article, we designed a data model and drew a maze with dots spread into the maze. Now we are ready to create the Pac-Man character. The Pac-Man character is controlled by the game player to move around the maze. While he is moving, he keeps gobbling dots along the path. To implement the Pac-Man character, we divide the coding into a few tasks so that we can create it bit by bit:

When I was young I was fascinated by arcade games. One of my favorites was the Pac-Man game.  Recently, when I was learning the JavaFX language, I decided to write the game in JavaFX.  Based on my experience in other programming languages, I assumed there would be some amount of work in building a game such as Pac-Man, giving me a good feel for RIA development in JavaFX.

The Weekly RIA RoundUp returns this week with a new partnership between Adobe and Facebook, Ribbit asking the development community for advice, an easy way to include Silverlight content into Wordpress posts, a new release of Tour De Flex, a refresh for JavaFX and Netbeans, Titanium reaches preview release 3, and much more. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

I work for a company called Farata Systems. Laura is our office manager, and she doesn’t know Java. Everyone else does. We work in the enterprise RIA space using Adobe Flex as a main development tool for creating all these...

Sun has moved JavaFX into a production release. You can either download NetBeans preconfigured with everything you need to get started, the JavaFX production suite, which enables workflow between designers and developers, of just the JavaFX SDK.

Are Java developers going to ignore JavaFX in favor of Flex?

I recently had the chance to chat with JavaFX team members Josh Marinacci and Jacob Lehrbaum on a conference call. I had the chance to ask them all of the questions that you guys submitted here on the site.

The interview is 25 minutes and the guys cover everything from the basics of JavaFX to future plans for the platform.

The folks developing JavaFX have taken the rather pragmatic approach of writing plug-ins to Adobe's CS3 products rather than create their own design tools ... does that neutralize one of Adobe's and Microsoft's most important competitive advantages?

Last week's release of the JavaFX Preview SDK brought a lot of buzz from all over the RIA landscape. There was a lot of good information, and many people admitted they still didn't know a great deal about JavaFX.

So, here is your chance. We are going to compile a list of questions from the users here at InsideRIA and then send them on to some members of the JavaFX team. This is your chance to get your questions heard. So, bring on the questions by leaving a comment.

If you haven't heard the news yet, today Sun released the JavaFX preview SDK (previously covered on insideria here and here). I decided to dive and and see it for myself. Here's what I found (from a developer's perspective)...

JavaFX launched their technical preview today. I had the privilege to talk earlier this week with Joshua Marinacci one of the engineers working on JavaFX. I learned that the preview SDK that was released today is just a piece of the overall JavaFX puzzle.

Sun Microsystems releases a new preview of the JavaFX SDK available to everyone.