Jason lee 2014-06-09

I've been tinkering with a couple of different JavaFX projects for a while now. Due to other commitments, they've been largely ignored recently, but I made some time this weekend to return to them. Since I last looked at them, Java 8, and, thus, JavaFX 8, have been release, so I decided to see how the tooling in NetBeans has changed to stay apace with the development of the libraries. While there are certainly updates, it seems new projects are still built using Ant. Yuck. igniter.fx project, so I took a look to see what that POM does to support JavaFX. As it turns out, it's pretty simple. For those interested, I have extracted here the basic POM:

Jason Lee 2014-05-29

Recently, Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manager in the Oracle Developer Tools group, posted a video on his blog showing "14 NetBeans Web Development Tips in 7 Minutes", which showed off several nice tips for the IDE (1 and 5 are my favorites). If you're like me, sometimes you don't have (or don't want to make) time to watch a video, so I thought I'd make a table of contents for the video, with links to relevant portion of it for those that would like to read the list and watch only the parts that interest them.

Jason Lee 2014-05-01

If you search for how to upload a file to a JAX-RS 2 endpoint, most suggestions will point you to implementation-specific approaches. While that works, it defeats one of the purposes of a spec: portability. There are some posts out there that will point you in the right direction, though. What I'll do here, then, is present a clear, portable solution to the problem.

I was recently sent a copy of _Java EE and HTML5 Enterprise Application Development_ by John Brock , Arun Gupta , and Geertjan Wielenga . This is my review of the book.

by Carl Sessa is, as you may have deduced from the title, a collection of 50 tips and tricks to help Android developers of all skill levels handle a variety of problems. For the most part, I found the book very helpful. Before I get to that, I have a minor quibble: I'm not sure "hacks" was the best choice of words. I understand the marketing aspect of it, but when I hear "hack", I think of a piece of code I'm embarrassed to share with someone else, of something I'd prefer to hide. These "hacks" seem anything but. Clean, clear, efficient, something to be proud of. It's a minor quibble, of course, but there it is. :)

The book itself is pretty easily laid out. If you've read a "cookbook", then you should be comfortable and familiar with the basic layout. Each chapter is a different tip, which range from the "easy" (e.g., centering text in a view) to the more advanced (e.g., using the SyncAdapter ). The topics covered include layouts, animations, build tools and more.

I read this, appropriately enough, using the Kindle App on my Android tablet, and the experience was very good. I've read several programming books on my tablet, and they usually have issues with unreadable source code, large blanks due to content flow issues, etc. Some of this is affected, of course, by the font size and is fixable, but I saw none of those issues here. All of the source, both XML and Java, were neatly formatted and readable, with no odd, jarring line wrap issues. The graphics were crisp and readable, and the pages were neat and clean.

This is a great book, especially for beginning to intermediate Android developers, but I'd wager that there's something here for just about everyone.