Announcing the JavaFX UI controls sandbox

[Jonathan Giles]

Hi everyone.

This is something I've been waiting a really, really, really long time 
to announce, but it has finally happened. Today I am so pleased to 
announce the opening of the JavaFX UI controls sandbox repository on 
OpenJFX. This repo is a fork of the JavaFX 8.0 controls repo, but will 
occasionally sync from there to keep it up to date. This repo is 
intended for OpenJFX developers to put their 'toys' until such time that 
they get called up to the big leagues for inclusion into OpenJFX itself 
(although there are no guarantees that this will ever happen). This 
means that the controls are functional, but most probably not feature 
complete with a finalised API or any significant documentation.

The reason why I've been wanting to open this sandbox up is so that 
members of the JavaFX community can get super early access to our 
controls as soon as they reach the most minimal level of maturity, and 
help guide them along their paths to adulthood. I also wanted to do this 
as it takes a long time between developing a UI control and having it 
appear in a JavaFX release. This is something that has frustrated me, 
and a number of you, to no end.

 From the get-go there are a few controls in this repo that you may be 
interested to play with and give us feedback on. They are TreeTableView 
(although note this is currently undergoing a total rewrite), Dialogs 
(ala JOptionPane from Swing), TableView cell span support (look at 
TableView.spanModel for more info), and a RangeSlider control. These 
controls will develop over time, but of course we're always on the 
lookout for others who want to improve these controls for us. If you're 
interested specifically in tending to the new controls in the sandbox, 
please email me and we can discuss it.

For those of you interested in taking a look at the code, you can do a 
'hg clone' of the following url: 
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx/sandbox-8/controls/rt.

Finally, there are some screenshots of the new controls here: 
http://fxexperience.com/2012/10/announcing-the-javafx-ui-controls-sandbox/

Thanks,
Jonathan