J1 Session Blog: Extreme GUI makeover: Hybrid Swing and JavaFX
In the past years the Extreme GUI Makeover sessions proved extremely informative, entertaining and popular. Every year I was curious to see whether they were able to keep up to the level of the previous year or even top it. Last year the session showed first signs of wearing out. This year a completely new team (Amy Fowler, Jasper Potts etc) took over from Romain Guy and Chet Haase. With JavaFX being a big topic at this years JavaOne it was quite obvious to use this for the makeover.
And they did a pretty good job by taking the Swing-based mail application of the 2006 session and employed JavaFX to pimp it up even more. It is obviously not too hard to integrate Swing components into a JavaFX user interface (the other way round is not really feasible). JavaFX is simply the stage and Swing components can be included as a node (after wrapping them into some kind of JavaFX component). However, hooking up the event handlers is fairly cumbersome and does not really scale for complex applications with lots of event handlers.
One highlight of the session was the address book of the mail application. They used JavaFX and Java2D to give a 3D impression of turning the pages with the mouse. Visually stunning although the user interface is totally impractical for everyday usage.
The culmination of the session was certainly their idea of junk mail removal. They were using an animation which launched a rocket and on impact the spam mail exploded and disappeared accordingly. Being both funny and pointless this also perfectly illustrated how easy it is to add animation to a Java application and how difficult it will be to enhance productivity of business applications by means of JavaFX.
