In need of a volunteer or two to test a link for me

Question

Hi guys, I need a favour.
I am getting close to releasing an alpha version of a browser framework for JFX that I've alluded to a couple of times on the forum.
I have put together a showcase of it and, with some help from Jonathan, I've gotten through the initial setup hurdles. Jonathan's sent me some screen shots however of how it looks on his machine and the styles are not coming through. I'm hoping its just because he's using a development build so I'm looking for a couple of people to test out the application at the following link and, if possible, send me some screenshots:
http://www.zenjava.com/demo/jfxflow/showcase/
You can either email screenshots directly to me at danjz at hotmail.com or use something like TinyGrab (http://tinygrab.com/download.php).
On my machine it looks like this:
http://tardis1.tinygrab.com/grabs/b4dfc5e9614e014b82932d087d60f30b69057f719c.png
http://tardis1.tinygrab.com/grabs/b4dfc5e961ac8c84cfb466cc59efb0c5f9645f84dd.png
I'm also keenly aware of the fact that this showcase is only just styled enough not to be hideously ugly. Given its meant to be a framework to encourage slick GUIs this is something I'd like to address but there's only so much one man can do after hours. If there are any creative individuals out there interested in making the showcase more sexy (i.e. styling it up, adding more animations, putting in icons, logos and colours), please get in contact, any and all help welcome! There's no technical reason why we can't do stuff like this in JFX:
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/10/showcase-funky-and-experimental-websites/
http://www.delpadre.com/
http://www.kincreative.com/blog/A-few-funky-Flash-sites/6800/
Much appreciated!
zonski

Answer 1

Thanks for the feedback Michael, I definitely appreciate it!
I've just made JFX Flow public and gotten a jar up onto the site (and into a public snapshot repository). I'll put up a separate forum post with the details straight after this.
In the mean time, some comments to your helpful feedback inline below.
To my opinion it is absolutely crucial for the success of
JavaFX on the web to fully support a more App-like behaviourI agree 1 million percent (yea, that much) about the whole deployment thing. Even the slightest annoyance for the user in the Java/JFX installation and running is, in my opinion, the single biggest hurdle to JFX being taken up. Make this seamless then I genuinely believe that JFX will go as (or more) viral than Flash has, which is what I would love to see happen! This issue, plus the horrid default look and lack of styling is what stopped Swing being the king it should have been.
I use chrome and when it wants to install a plugin it just says "this page needs a plugin to run do you want to install?", - one click and 30 seconds later and its all done. If Java+JFX installation was this easy we would have rapid uptake! Currently (or last time I did it anyway) I get a prompt to install Java, which takes me to a web page, where I have to agree to T&C, I agree, I install, I then have to manually go back to my website, I run my app (again), it prompts again but this time to install JFX, I say yes, then it does some more dialogs, I then get a loading a dialog, then a do you trust app dialog, and then finally, I might see my app (unless I'm a developer who has a couple of JVMs installed in which case it seems to be pot-luck which one JFX got installed to and which one the browser launches via webstart).
Just this week I had to agree to make a traditional web-front end for one of our upcoming systems to avoid the JFX installation issues when it is used by casual, add-hoc users. Painful and sad. It would almost be worth having a plugin that bundled the JVM into JFX for now and it all installed magically, instantly, in one click, rather than wait for Java 8 or 9 or whatever when they finally bundle it into the same platform. I'm sure there's a creative solution to this problem there somewhere. Ideally we would be at least as good as Flash in this area (preferably better).
Unfortunately my framework is at the mercy of the elements here. As far as I know FXML needs the signing still (or has this been sorted?). The showcase also uses Spring's annotation based config which does internal code generation. I could take this out and use something else (or role it by hand) but I think I also mess with a few class accessibility flags in a couple of areas of JFX Flow, which I think would also trigger the security manager to barf.
I definitely could and should officially sign my jar with a real certificate and only ask for the permissions I need. At this stage, I'm kind of taking advantage of the fact that it is other developers using the showcase and you guys will be more forgiving (right?). I will definitely put this on the todo list for a final release though. If you have other ideas based on the source code of ways to achieve things, I'd love some help.
Once inside your App (I have decided to trust you :-) )Brave man ;)
I observed that there seems to be a problem with the transitions.
When I click on a link or go back to a previous page, the page
seems to be shifted back and forth by a few pixels before the
transition takes place. This somehow ruins the otherwise
very nice effect.Bummer. I was hoping this was only on my machine as I've had it before on another project but a guy at work didn't see it.
It's not actually anything to do with transitions though, if you didn't go anywhere it would still do it when you just click on the link (I think). I don't think this is specifically anything I am doing. I think it is something to do with the styles of the hyperlink and/or button changing when they get armed or vsited or something and this changes their preferred size which causes the layout manager to readjust everything slightly. I spent a good few hours on it last time and just couldn't find the magic switch to make it work. I'll add it to the todo list though (again, help appreciated :) ).
When navigating to other pages you can easily get lost and
then you feel the need for something like a home button.Jonathan suggested the exact same thing. It is definitely part of the design that you can easily add a home button (and totally customise the browser if you want).
I actually had a home button on by default in early versions but then checked major browsers and this doesn't seem so popular any more so I took it out. Thinking about it though, a home option probably makes more sense for an application though than a general browser where home is less relevant. I think I will add this to the todo list.
Thinking about it, it would also be nice to have something like
a breadcrumb bar And again Jonathan suggested the exact same thing. I'm seeing a pattern :)
A breadcrumb bar would be pretty easy to implement. A simple one could just observe the NavigationManager.backList and create/remove buttons to match. I think this would be valuable to have in the framework as an optional control (and Jonathan mentioned he might provide some of his code that does something similar already, which would be nice).
Breadcrumbs only really work however when you have an acyclic navigation path though (as far as I know anyway, people are always coming up with clever solutions to problems so maybe someone has an approach that is user friendly?). In the showcase this would work and would be great as you always drill down and then back up. If you have an application like a 'contact manager' where you could view a person and then link to an organisation from that person and then back to the person from that organisation, you would end up with a pretty weird and fairly meaningless breadcrumb trail and I don't think it would make sense to have it.
The BrowserHeader is the class that provide this and Browser has a setHeader on it, the intention being that people could build their own headers (and footers) and easily attach it to the browser. The default one I have provided is deliberately simple. It might be worth having a couple of header implementations in the JFX Flow framework however, and people can just instantiate the one that best fits their needs (or still create their own). I'll think a bit more about it, but it has some merit. Probably not an urgent feature though, but definitely a cool one.
or even bookmarks.Yea, these are possible too and I had thought about it in the early design. Every page is referenced by a 'Place' object and you can get the current place from the NavigationManager so you can just stick that in a list or something (or show it however you want). I'd sort of forgotten about this (it's more a value-add feature) and I probably need to think about making place immutable or place having a clone() method or something so you can snapshot it for your bookmarks (in case someone edits the current place, kind of like a URL rewrite - you don't want this messing up your bookmark).
When you are hovering over a link there should always be
a visual feedback. On the Navigation-Page there are images
on which you can click but you don't see this in contrast
to the title texts which get underlined when you hover over
them.Yep, agree. I couldn't get styling working on those !@#$@ ImageViews. I don't know what's wrong with them. CSS selectors make me want to stab my eye out with a pencil and it was getting late at the time. I gave up before I could find a pencil. I will have to go and have another look down the road.
Dialogs should be positioned relative to the stage. On
the Using Dialogs page the simple dialog appears somewhere
in the middle of the screen where I would not expect it.Agreed. Also when the main stage is sent to back or minimized, the dialog should go with it but it currently doesn't.
Dialogs weren't actually part of the original feature set (I tend not to use them) but it seemed like a contentious issue for a lot of users and to build it on top of JFX Flow (which has a handy top level browser) seemed like an easy win. I need to put a little more love into them though. It's probably second on the todo list after docco at this stage.
Some other feature came to my mind. I ran your demo on a high
resolution laptop (1920x1200) and the text was a little bit
too small for my old eyes :-) and thus I was immediately
missing a featue of a browser to zoom the whole content via Ctrl-+Hmm, nice idea. I'm just a lowly consumer of the JFX API and I think the closest feature I'd have for this is 'scale', which I don't think would do the job (you really just want to add/subtract to the font size and scale only images). If there's a way to do this with stylesheets or something similar it could be added to JFX Flow? Otherwise I'm going to see if we can get the UI design guy looking at this stuff soon so we can get the JFX team at least thinking about features that would support this browser-style GUI out this for future releases. I know Richard is supportive of the browser idea and Jonathan has been real helpful and supportive so far in feedback and getting me through a few hurdles.
I hope that my comments are a little bit useful for you
and that you will continue your great work because it
addresses areas where JavaFX itself is really falling short.Thanks for the comments, they are definitely helpful and I would very much like you to keep firing them through. I'm happy to continue them here, or if you rather there are a couple of things that come with the google hosting. I've not used either yet but there are issues (http://code.google.com/p/jfxflow/issues/list) where you can file bugs and (http://groups.google.com/group/jfxflow-discuss) where we can discuss enhancements and ideas etc. If you have any problems with either, give me a shout as I may not have set them up properly or something.
Maybe when JFX Flow is big enough Atlassian will let me host all this stuff with them for free ;)
I'm also very glad you can see potential for JFX Flow adding value to the JFX space :)