Monthly Archives: September 2014

Sprint 68 finished

Today, iteration 68, codename “Flute”, was pushed to the git server. After a long summer break, Zong! is finally back in active development. Within the last sprints, we started to create the GWT-based web viewer (pure HTML5/JS score viewer) and finally switched from AWT/Swing to JavaFX 8. We have also rewritten all the IO stuff from blocking to asynchronous processing for better support of single-threaded environments like the web browser. As always, our progress is documented in our public tracker and in the wiki.

Nearly two years ago we found JavaFX not to be ready for real-world applications. Now, in version 8, JavaFX looks fantastic and is really fun to work with. For example, the SceneBuilder is a nice WYSIWYG editor for creating GUI in JavaFX, and connecting the controls and the actions to the Java controller class works straightforward. And, very important for Zong!, in a first test application for drawing lots of vector images (musical symbols) we observed very high performance. We are curious, if JavaFX will become more famous and bring Java applications back to the desktop. We already made our decision.