Announcing the JavaFX UI controls sandbox

[Jonathan Giles]

Randahl,

Of course I would love to see people contributing to the OpenJFX 
sandbox. First however developers would have to sign the Oracle 
Contributor Agreement, and then we can start accepting contributions. 
After some time of contributions being submitted via Jira I would be 
very happy to start giving access to developers to directly write to the 
repo (in other words, we want developers to prove themselves for a short 
while first). In general I think it is safe to say that we in OpenJFX 
(aka Oracle employees presently) would love to start seeing 
contributions from the community. OpenJFX is supposed to make us all one 
big team, so I can't wait for that to happen.

Of course, I do want to be very clear that a viable alternative repo 
already exists (and the bar for entry is somewhat lower): JFXtras is a 
growing repository full of JavaFX UI controls and other cool gadgets. I 
would say that the primary difference between the two repos is what 
JavaFX version they base themselves on: JFXtras is always based on the 
latest official release of JavaFX, whereas the sandbox is based on the 
next release (so in this case, JavaFX 8.0). Of course, I would love to 
see the controls we put out today in the sandbox 'back-ported' to 
JFXtras so that they are available to a wider community.

-- Jonathan

On 25/10/2012 12:56 p.m., Randahl Fink Isaksen wrote:
> Jonathan, this looks wonderful. I bet a lot of us are already developing a lot of cool controls, and I would love to see more synergy between projects for the benefit of everyone.
>
> Would you be interested in evaluating other kinds controls, if a project has made something which is not in the sandbox already?
>
> Randahl
>
>
> On Oct 24, 2012, at 21:44 , Jonathan Giles <jonathan.giles at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> 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