Giving confidence to code
Novice programmers often find themselves overwhelmed when it comes to writing their own applications. Sometimes what they need is a blueprint – an example to follow that shows them the way. “Introduction to JavaFX development” is written to do just that. It takes a simple description of an application and walks through how to build the program. Continue reading “Introduction to JavaFX development”
Quite often when building desktop applications there is a need to present information to the user. A popular means of doing this is through the use of a popup dialog box. JavaFX provides us with a few ways of doing this using the Alert dialog box. In this tutorial we take a look at the various types of alert from error to confirmation. Continue reading “JavaFX Alert dialog example”
When I first started out in programming, I made the same mistake I now see countless people make when starting. I wrote code for me and that worked, and that was good enough for me. As time passed and the code I produced expanded and became more ambitious so my bad habits became more ingrained. I think it is something we all do; we all go through. It is not until we encounter an issue, a reason to change, that we appreciate the error of our ways. If we are fortunate we get an opportunity to work with other more worldly wise programmers who can help us adopt good habits; if not then we need hard lessons to alter our behaviour.
Continue reading “Configure your application using a properties file”
Previously I had written a blog called “Wrap Java into an executable with Launch4J”. The title for the article I now realise was perhaps misleading in that it only covered how to download the tool and install. I understand that some readers may actually want an example of how to convert their Java code into an actual executable. This aims to address that short coming.
Continue reading “Wrap Java into an executable with Launch4J-Part 2”If your java desktop application needs to store data in a database between sessions then a good solution is to embed a database into your solution. What this gives you is an application which installs the database as part of the application, builds the database tables and populates it with any initial data. This approach avoids the need for the user to install a database separately from the application.
Let’s takes a look at how to you might go about this.
In the previous post we looked at displaying information in a hierarchy using JTree.
Now all this is fine but, usually when we use a JTree it is because we want to be able to select an item, one or more. For our example let us concern ourselves with selecting a single item and displaying the detail associated with that item. Continue reading “Using JTree to select information”
The other day I came across an example where a formula written in a Java program could be represented as a standard equation on the screen. I thought this was brilliant. I recall back in my Uni days using the formula editor in Microsoft Word to present formulas. Now I don’t have a use for this in Java yet but, you never know. However, in case anyone out there does have a requirement to produce a formula from within their Java program then maybe this will help.
The challenge is to produce an output that looks like this:
Traversing the file system is one of the common tasks required in applications. Search the web for examples and you can find plenty of examples of how to go about it. One of the most popular is to work through the file system using recursive calls like this: Continue reading “Traversing the file system”
Whilst developing an application the other day I wanted to create a repeating task. Looking around for a solution I came across the Timer and TimerTask classes. These two classes in combination looked like a perfect solution to my problem. It was only when I came to implement my solution I noticed something about how they work. Continue reading “Using Java Timer to build a countdown timer”
Imagine we have a small JavaFX application. We are building this application in Eclipse, although this should not make any material difference, you could build it in using any IDE or simple command line tools.
This application has some java files under the “src” folder. There is also a “resources” folder which contains some none java files which the application will reference. Added to this we are using some 3rd party JAR libraries. Finally, we have a text-based properties file for our application.
Our project structure looks like this:
We are going to use ANT to produce a Windows executable application. The steps we need to take to do this are: – Continue reading “ANT – A worked example”
