UNESCO, J-ISIS, and the JavaFX 2.2 WebView
- by Geertjan
J-ISIS, which is the newly developed Java version of the UNESCO generalized information storage and retrieval system for bibliographic information, continues to be under heavy development and code refactoring in its open source repository. Read more about J-ISIS and its NetBeans Platform basis here.
Soon a new version will be available for testing and it would be cool to see the application in action at that time. Currently, it looks as follows, though note that the menu bar is under development and many menus you see there will be replaced or removed soon:
About one aspect of the application, the browser, which you can see above, Jean-Claude Dauphin, its project lead, wrote me the following:
The DJ-Native Swing JWebBrowser has been a nice solution for getting a Java Web Browser for most popular platforms. But the Java integration has always produced from time to time some strange behavior (like losing the focus on the other components after clicking on the Browser window, overlapping of windows, etc.), most probably because of mixing heavyweight and lightweight components and also because of our incompetency in solving the issues.
Thus, recently we changed for the JavaFX 2.2 WebWiew. The integration with Java is fine and we have got rid of all the DJ-Native Swing problems. However, we have lost some features which were given for free with the native browsers such as downloading resources in different formats and opening them in the right application.
This is a pretty cool step forward, i.e., the JavaFX integration. It also confirms for me something I've heard other people saying too: the JavaFX WebView component is a perfect low threshold entry point for Swing developers feeling their way into the world of JavaFX.
