Given the following JavaFX Script class and variable declaration:

public class Foo {
    public var i:Integer = 1024 on replace {
        if (i < 1000) {
            i = 1000;
        } else if (i > 2000) {
            i = 2000;
        }
    }
}

var foo: Foo;

is it possible for this line of code later in the program:

println(foo.i)

to print anything other than an integer between 1000 and 2000 onto the console?

Responses[1]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on March 28, 2009 9:06:29 AM CDT #

(Via Twitter.)

JavaFX.com:

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• 2nd Place: $10,000
  
  
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Student category: We will award three prizes at $1,500 each to the top three applications submitted by students. Student submissions will compete for the larger prize amounts as well, but only one prize per entry will be awarded.

Up to 100 honorable mention prizes of a $25 Amazon Gift certificate will be rewarded. (Restrictions apply for international users.)

The era of "getting paid to use their software" has arrived. It's the next logical step of Free Software and Open Source. (I heard Doug Schmidt say it at least five years ago, may be ten.)

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<shameless-self-promotion>Oh, here's just the book that night help you getting started (It's still in alpha (the book, not the technology), available as ebook chapters, blah, blah,...):</shameless-self-promotion>

And I still have a few free ebook coupons left. Email weiqigao at speakeasy dot net to get it.

[Update] (Thu Mar 19 06:39:42 CDT 2009) All the coupons are spoken of. Thanks for the interest.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on March 18, 2009 10:40:15 PM CDT #

Once upon a time, a blog post a couple of hours after a JUG talk was considered a fast news reporting.

Not anymore!

For Eric Burke's Android talk tonight at the St. Louis JUG, twitterers (@codetojoy @kylecordes @scottbale @MarioAquino @puredanger) were out in force. And tweets were flying during the talk.

Eric showed up with his signature "Angry Pitchfork Guy" T-shirt:

Tonight's talk is a follow up to the OCI Java lunch talk that Eric gave four months ago when Android 1.0 was just released. (Find it on YouTube: 1 of 3, 2 of 3, and 3 of 3.)

We had a big crowd today. Some people came just for the Android content. And Eric did not disappoint (well, maybe Kyle). He showed the Android app he wrote and put on the app store.

Like always, the pre- and post- talk chattering is just as interesting. I overheard:

• We are working on a JavaFX project.
• They started a long time ago, when JavaFX was called just JavaF
• They started so long ago when it was still called OakFX
• What's up with Google? They compile Java code to anything but the JVM
• JavaFX was demoed on Android in JavaOne 2008, but no one is talking about it
• I took out my G1 and scanned the bar code on a TV while talking with a sales person. He's not pleased
• We had Lambda Lounge last week, No Fluff Just Stuff last weekend, Matt Taylor's Griffon talk at Groovy Users Group yesterday, and Android today. A very geeky week
• "Force Closed", that's the opposite of "Use the Force"

I gave away a few coupons for a free copy of the "Pro JavaFX Platform" ebook that is available in Apress's alpha program now. I still have a few left, if you would like one, send a private email to weiqigao at speakeasy.net.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on March 13, 2009 12:34:18 AM CDT #

As you might have heard from James Weaver or Stephen Chin, or Joshua Marinacci, the book Jim Weaver, Stephen Chin, Dean Iverson and I have been working on for the last few months

entered Apress's Alpha Program.

While I have told friends and colleagues that I'm co-authoring a JavaFX book, and I twittered it once, I have not officially announced it in my blog. So this may come as a surprise to some of you who reads this blog regularly. Although the lack of new blog entries recently should have tipped you off that something is up with Weiqi.

So why?

I started following JavaFX from the JavaOne 2007 announcement. I did my first JavaFX talk at the St. Louis Java Users Group on July 12, 2007, perhaps the earliest one outside Sun. I then watched the compiled version of JavaFX Script language being developed as open source by people like Brian Goetz, Per Bothner and colleagues at Sun. And Jim Weaver asked me to be a tech reviewer for his first book on JavaFX in late 2007.

All along, my biggest impression of JavaFX Script is that it's a fun language to program in and, because of its GUI DSL focus, it has the potential of becoming a very useful language in that field. Therefore by the Summer of 2008, when I wanted to do a talk at OCI's famed Java lunch, I offered to talk about either JavaFX or Clojure, which is another language that I think has a potential, although in a different area. Most of my colleagues wanted to hear about JavaFX, so that's what I presented. I presented on the Friday before the release of the JavaFX Preview SDK at the end of July. Naturally I focused on the language features because the other parts are not open source. I wondered aloud about Sun's intentions. (Ironically, that post remained on Sun's most popular JavaOne blogs for quite a while.)

The July talk turned into a December 2008 JNB article, which went to press three days before JavaFX 1.0 was released. The responses from the JavaFX community was very positive. It even got a nod from the source of it all—Chris Oliver.

Meanwhile, my "It works on Linux" series of tips for how to run JavaFX on Linux (seen here, here, here, and here) became popular. I had gotten hundred times more hits from these blog entries then the other average blog entries, which for me is proof that JavaFX is being at least tried out by a lot of people.

When Jim asked me to join the Pro JavaFX Platform team, I gladly agreed. The writing process is harder than I anticipated, but the brilliance of the other team members pulled me through, and I think the result is a book that a lot of people can use and learn.

Like Stephen Chin, I did my writing in the evenings and weekends while working on my day job during the day. Changing of projects added to the suspense. Imagine my internal reaction when Ken called and asked "Weiqi, do you know X?" (X being something other than Java, which is my main job function.) "I took a look at it five years ago." "Can you join this death march project (using X)?" "Sure." The expectation was that I will brush up my X during the evenings and weekends and be an X expert during the day.

The lesson I learned is that book reading and book writing are two incompressible tasks. I cut back my sleep time and blogging time.

Now that the book is here in alpha form. We invite everyone to read it, learn JavaFX, and let us know any deficiencies it may still contain. That way we can make the final book better.

Responses[3]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on March 5, 2009 4:50:33 PM CST #