Desktop on foojay.io - Friends of OpenJDK

Introducing a New Java DMX512 Library With Demo JavaFX User Interface

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 06:17:00 +0000

In this post, I would like to inform you about a new Java library that is now available on Maven Central, allowing interaction with DMX512 devices using (optionally) the Open Fixture Library (OFL). I also published a video with a code walkthrough of my test setup and demo code.

But first…

Autopo: An open source tool to automate .po file translation with AI.

Mon, 12 May 2025 07:12:39 +0000

As a developer today, you’ve almost certainly encountered the need of localizing your application or website. While setting up your project for internationalization is usually straightforward, managing translations over time can become a complex, time consuming and costly task, especially for open source projects.

Fortunately, machine translation have come a long way. It’s not perfect, but with the right context, modern AI can deliver surprisingly accurate results.

In this article , I’ll walk you through the journey that led me to create Autopo , a free and open source JavaFX desktop tool for managing .po files and with AI-powered features to translate and validate .po entries.

More Free Shells for your Java IDE

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 14:30:57 +0000

You may be using one of the terminal applications installed on your operating system or use the included terminal panel of the IDE.

Not all shells are included in your IDE. Here is a list of shells by default supported for the IDE’s based on my Windows computer.

|———————————–|—————|———|—————–| | Shell | IntelliJ IDEA | Eclipse | Apache NetBeans | | Command Prompt | ✅ | ✅ | | | Powershell | ✅ | | | | WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) | ✅ | ✅ | | | Git Bash | (1) | ✅ | | | Cygwin | (1) | | ✅ | | SSH (Secure SHell) | | ✅ | ✅ |

Azul Brings Java from Edge to Cloud

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 11:30:22 +0000

In Part 1 of this series, “A Fresh Look at Embedded Java ,” we explored the use of Java for embedded use cases.

Azul and its Zulu Build of OpenJDK (Zulu) are the ideal partners in this part of the software world.

Let’s expand and look at the cloud part of a typical end-to-end solution with sensors, edge devices, client applications, and cloud services.

Azul Platform Core for edge devices and client applications

Because Java delivers fast development speed thanks to its amazing methods and tools and its impressive performance in handling massive amounts of data, it’s the ideal programming language for building applications for edge devices that collect data from various sensors.

JavaFX Links of July 2024

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 17:54:43 +0000

Here is the overview of the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of July 2024, published on jfx-central.com during this month.

Core

A message by Kevin Rushforth on the [email protected] mailing list shows the Java/JavaFX release train is approaching the next station ;-): “Bump the version number of JavaFX to 24. I will integrate this to master as part of forking the jfx23 stabilization branch, which is scheduled for Thursday, July 11, 2024 at 16:00 UTC.” We’re looking forward to the release of v23 in September!

Applications

Özkan Pakdil is working on an opensource alternative for Postman : “I am looking for people to test or join, it’s in beta phase, but I am sure http get is working.” You can find it on GitHub .
LogoRRR is now available for download in the Microsoft App Store !
Sean Phillips shared a screenshot : “New automatic Clustering features available from main branch of the Trinity 3D Visual Explainable AI tool. You can configure and asynchronously run multiple clustering algorithms in 3D, including DBSCAN, HDBSCAN, KMeans++, KMedoids Affinity Propagation, and more.”
Emad Hanif shared a long description and video of Barcodify : “Built with JavaFX, Spring Core and RxJava. This application empowers users to personalize every aspect, from color schemes and font sizes to margins and bar dimensions, delivering a comprehensive package with an elegant design. It currently supports 8 types of linear barcodes — Code39, Code128, Codabar, Interleaved 2 of 5, UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, and EAN-13.”
Christopher Schnick added native window styling to XPipe 10 .
Xiong Chun shared progress in Datacollie : “Tonight, the basic SQL query and result display of the SQL query window implemented. There are still many details to be improved in this module.”
Igor Azarny released v2.5.5 of Gitember, a cross platform graphical user interface for GIT . You can find the sources on GitHub .
JabRef announced release 5.15 with a blog post , “with binaries for Intel macs and fixes for Snap users. This release comes with some nice improvements for TeXLaTeX users and experimental support for using bst styles as preview.”
WebFX shared an app they are hosting at meteo.webfx.dev : “It showcases some cool webfx features: Scene graph (no canvas), Charts, Dual CSS (javafx & web), I18n, Json, Web service, Java service, Local storage, Sound.”
Patrik Karlström shared screenshots : “Bringing back the cron like scheduler to my JavaFX based rsync gui. Converting the old swing cron dialog was much less work than expected. JavaFX really do have nice things to offer!”
Datacollie, the SQL UI by Xiong Chun looks more-and-more impressive : “The paging model of the SQL query result is determined, and a toolbar is added to the result table.”

Games

5kovic made Tetris : “Music and background found on Google, links in comment section.”
Mark J Koch is reverse engineering the “Game of the Year” from 1989 : “Screen grab of browsing the sprites extracted from the Neuromancer PC .DAT files. They are stored as indexed color, RLE and Huffman encoded blobs of data. I wrote some Java code to extract/decompress/decode them from the file and write them to a ‘cache’ directory as PNG files. The game came on two floppies and is still one of my favorites and I play it in a DOS emulator from time to time.”
OrangoMango made a game in 24h for the indiedevgamejam : “Escape and drive on the highway as long as you can. By driving on the 2 leftmost lanes you get double score as well as driving fast.” You can play it on orangomango.itch.io/milkywayescape .

Components, Libraries, Tools

Pedro Duke shared a video : “A bunch of changes coming to Transit Theme… One of them is that if you change it to Dark style it will also change the Window frame of where the theme is applied. (JavaFX always shows the Window frame in light color)”
- And Pedro published a new post: “Transit Version 2.0 Released” : “Styles work as User Agent Stylesheets like Modena (much easier to override) + True Dark Mode (Window frame also changes when set to Dark style).”
Dirk Lemmermann shared a screenshot of an implementation of the FlexGanttFX library : “We use it in our energy CRM system to visualise the consumption data provided by the home-installed electricity smart meters of our customers. In addition, it shows the time when our backend services send a request to the meters to send their data and which time periods they requested.”

Podcasts, Videos, Books

Frank Delporte published a video in which he experiments with the Azul Zulu runtimes with JavaFX support, JBang, and SDKMAN on a Raspberry Pi and a lot of colored circles.
- Based on this experiment, he published an additional blog and video with a demo application to compare the performance between thousands of Nodes versus drawing the same number of elements on a Canvas : “On a Mac Studio, performance drops after 15k Nodes, versus 150k with Canvas.”
YouTube Shorts by OrangoMango :
- Falling sand with JavaFX
- Conway’s Game Of Life implementation in Java and JavaFX

Tutorials

On dev.to, Paul Ngugi is publishing a blog series of JavaFX tutorials .

Miscellaneous

Mark Fortner replies to a message by Justin Fagnani about Flutter : “It’s always interesting watching people re-invent the future. JavaFX has all of the features that you describe. Scenegraphs, multilanguage support, compiles to WASM, CSS. I think it really boils down to one’s willingness to get out of one’s comfort stack.”
A new video by Christopher Schnick : “The JavaFX 22 platform preferences API in action with native window themes on Windows 11.”
- Christopher also reports : “Seems like JavaFX applications run fine on Windows ARM systems through the x86_64 compatibility layer.”
Gerrit Grunwald shared a screenshot of a private project (“sorry not allowed to share…”) which recreates the QLOCKTWO in JavaFX.
Chris is wondering : “Why are large displays in public spaces, including electronic ordering screens windows based?! It should be JavaFX territory running lightweight Linux on an SOC device.”

JFX Central

The overview of the Links Of The Week of June are bundled on Foojay .
New content:
- Learn > JavaFX: Comparing Nodes versus Canvas .
- Learn > JavaFX on Raspberry Pi: Experiment with Azul Zulu, SDKMAN, and JBANG .
Dirk Lemmermann shared this message with a screenshot : “We are working on a mobile-only version of jfx-central.com. The routing framework and the development ’environment’ provided by @jpro_one and Florian Kirmaier helps a lot. It even allows us to simulate different phone resolutions.” Check all the commits by Li Wang Yang in the public GitHub repository .

Foojay Podcast #54: Music and MIDI with Java and Kotlin

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 18:23:33 +0000

MIDI is a universal standard for communicating between musical instruments and computers.

Within OpenJDK, there is a whole Java package dedicated to MIDI communication and data handling. Is it up to date? Are there better approaches now? And what can we do with music, Java, and Kotlin?

Let’s find out…

Video

Podcast Apps

You can listen and subscribe to the Foojay Podcast on:

12 Text Tools For Developers

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:31:13 +0000

As developer, you would think we would spend all our time in an IDE doing development. The reality is a bit different. We may need to analyze logs, test our web services, generate test data, do security tests, analyze data in the database, and so on. Text processing os also part of a developer job. Let’s see a few free text tools to simplify your job.

Using online tools makes me wonder if I’m leaking company data to the website, so I wrote a desktop freeware Japplis Toolbox containing a collection of text tools.

Run JavaFX on the Windows Subsystem for Linux and More!

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:11:56 +0000

What does it take to run standalone JavaFX applications on exotic Linux systems like the Windows Subsystem for Linux or some embedded systems? As you will see, not a lot! Familiarizing yourself with the native libraries required by JavaFX and the font loading process is all that is needed. Then, JavaFX applications can run on them out of the box if you set everything up correctly.

Most graphical Linux systems will automatically come with all the native libraries that are required by Java(FX) as these are pretty standard. Running a standalone Java(FX) application, which has been created with jlink or jpackage for example, on these systems works without having to put in any thought about possible dependencies. However, there are systems where this is not the case.

Creating Executables For JavaFX Applications

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 13:46:50 +0000

Here on Foojay, you can already find some great articles on how to create native executables from your JavaFX code:

Let’s take a look in this article at the current state of what can be done with jpackage and GitHub Actions.

All the sources and workflow files used here can be found in the JavaPackageDemo repository .

Java for desktop applications: Tips and Tricks (Part 1)

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:18:15 +0000

As desktop applications have kind of become a niche topic, it’s getting harder to find information about up-to-date best practices for desktop development.

Since I have been doing this for many years now, I hope that I can share some of the lessons learned with other fellow desktop developers. Most items that are discussed here are taken straight from XPipe , the application I am working on right now. So if you’re skeptical or are interested in more details, you can take a look at the actual source code or try them in action yourself in the actual application.