WidgetFX is one of the first open source projects to be built on top of JavaFX. It ships with a clock, photo viewer, and RSS reader, though more widgets are on the way.

For the full feature list check out Stephen Chin’s blog entry on the release and the the main WidgetFX.org website.

(Via JavaFX Blog.)

Head over to mir.aculo.us to learn what this is about and grab the beta version!

Note: Obviously, the beta version is not recommended for production sites, and syntax might change before it gets stable
(but it’s pretty much final, so don’t be too afraid).

(Via script.aculo.us web 2.0 javascript.)

Today a last compilation of the year comes. To play the record click here.

Track list:

1. Outsiders - Hallowed (David Amo & Julio Navas Remix)
2. Beltek - Playmaker (Passenger 10 Remix)
3. Seamless Twelves - Obsession (Greg Stainer Mix)
4. Jody Wisternoff - Starstrings (Tocadisco Remix)
5. Andain - Beautiful Things (Dave Robertson Remix)
6. Dirty Vegas - Pressure (Sultan and Ned Shepard Remix)
7. Ben Lb - A Reason to Leave (Manuel de La Mare & Alex Kenji Remix)
8. Matt Samuels ft For The Masses - Enjoy the Silence (Noir Remix)
9. Kaskade - Step One Two (Tommy Trash Remix)
10. Magnesia - Today (Bart B More Remix)
11. The Ting Tings - Fruit Machine (Bimbo Jones Remix)

(Via Adium News.)

We’re happy to announce that our second alpha release of Fennec has come together.  While we focused much of the previous alpha on getting the user experience how we wanted, we’ve spent much of the time since focused on improving performance.  We’ve made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading.

The release notes have information on a quick start, how to install, what’s new, known issues and how to provide feedback. So if you’re interested in getting involved with Mozilla Mobile, install Fennec and tell us what you think.

Congratulations to the entire mobile team!

(Via The Mozilla Blog.)

Major things include:

- Support for Python 3.0 and Python 2.6
- The context-based find definition was moved from Pydev Extensions to Pydev Open source (note that the context-independent part, which goes on to find a definition from all the available tokens in your workspace is still only available in Pydev Extensions)
- A major bug was fixed in the parser when multiple threads were making the parse (this became more evident in java 6 with its optimizations, so, if you found out you had warnings that sometimes appeared nonsense, it should be fixed now)
- Hovers were added for docstrings and to show variables when debugging

Aside from that, there are a bunch of other bugfixes available.

Note that there are some things that are probably still missing to say that the Python 3.0 support is a 100% finished (most notably, the coverage is still not available because the coverage.py module used still does not support it… so, it’s waiting on that to properly support it) and as it’s a really big change, there’s probably a bunch of other things that are still missing… so, I’m waiting on the bug reports

(Via Pydev adventures.)

• MacFUSE detection code added, preventing the user to use NTFS-3G with broken MacFUSE releases such as the 2.0.0 release.

Download NTFS-3G 1.5130 Update 2 [ublio] (performance patches applied)
Download NTFS-3G 1.5130 Update 2 [stable]

Packaging, patching, some OS X-related development and testing is done in the context of my development efforts with the Catacombae projects.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4/10.5, a PowerPC or Intel computer, MacFUSE 2.0.2/2.0.3 or later installed.
This package has been tested with Mac OS X 10.4.11/Intel and Mac OS X 10.5.6/Intel.

Information on how to install and use NTFS-3G for Mac OS X can be found in the User Guide.
If you are having problems with NTFS-3G, write a post about it in the NTFS-3G Forum (or post a question as a blog comment if you’re just unsure of how things work).

Known issues:

• Files with filenames created in Windows containing international characters with accents, umlauts and similar dots and lines, or filenames with korean characters might seem unreadable in the Finder. This is because Finder apparently expects all filenames to appear in unicode decomposed form, while NTFS allows both composed and decomposed form filenames. This issue is hard to solve in a pretty way, but you should still be able to access these files when using the Terminal. For me, copying the affected files to a HFS+ drive using the command “cp” worked fine.
• After installing ntfs-3g, all NTFS drives will disappear from the “Startup Disk” preference pane. Disabling or uninstalling ntfs-3g brings them back. I don’t have a solution for this, but you can still choose your startup drive by:
  • Holding down the Option key during boot (or Alt for non-Apple keyboards).
  • Intel users only: Install the rEFIt boot manager for better control of the boot process.
  • Using the command line utility bless (see man bless for more information)

  If you have any information on a pretty way of solving this issue, I’d love to hear about it.

Sources:
ntfs-3g 1.5130u2 (patched)
ntfsprogs 1.13.1
fuse_wait.c
ntfs-3g_daemon.c

(Via NTFS-3G for OS X Revived.)

 JavaFX 1.0 SDK Update 1 provides the following enhancements:

• This release contains performance enhancements that enable smoother
  playback of large video files on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows
  platforms. It contains functional changes that enable video to be
  played as it progressively downloads from a remote server through HTTP
  requests.
• Progressive downloading is now enabled for WMV, FLV, and FXM video
  files on the Microsoft platform. The video startup time on the
  Microsoft Windows platform has been improved in this release.
• Forward-seeking is now enabled for FLV and FXM files on both Mac OS
  X and Microsoft Windows, when seeking within the currently downloaded
  buffer. Seeking beyond the buffer is not currently supported.

Release notes for the update are available here. You can see the video enhancements in action here.

We’ve also released a new tutorial - Deploy A Rich Internet Application Developed With JavaFX Technology on javafx.com. This tutorial guides readers through the different options for deploying JavaFX applications as Java Web Start (JNLP),
Java applet, or stand-alone applications on the desktop, in a browser,
or using the JavaFX Mobile Emulator.

(Via JavaFX Blog.)

The much awaited DWR version 3.0 has reached release candidate 1. What's new?

• RPC Enhancements
  • Varargs support
  • Method overloading (DWR tries to copy Java's method matching rules)
  • Typed parameters (so you can say new Apple() in JavaScript and pass it to the addFruit() method and DWR will instantiate the correct type on the server)
  • Lightweight typed parameters (as above, but by adding $dwrClassName:"Apple", for when you are getting the objects from something else)
• More natural synchronous XHR (so you can call var reply = Remote.getData() when doing 'Sjax')
• Improved Marshalling
  • Binary file upload/download (byte[], java.awt.BufferedImage, InputStream etc and FileTransfer can be uploaded from an input type=file, offered for download, or sent to an img)
• Functions (Store a reference to a JavaScript function on the server for later execution)
• Objects by Reference (Store a reference to a JavaScript object, and then call methods on that)
• Locale, Currency (DWR will marshal to and from java.util.Locale and java.util.Currency objects)
• Reverse Ajax
  • JavaScript can now implement a Java interface (For simple integration with Java Events/Listeners)
  • More scalable Reverse Ajax APIs (See org.directwebremoting.Browser)
  • DOM Manipulation Library (Window and Document can now be manipulated from the server)
  • The server now runs in 3 modes: stateless (New - save memory with no page tracking), passiveReverseAjax (the default) and activeReverseAjax (comet enabled)
• TIBCO GI Integration
  • Complete set of Reverse Ajax Proxy APIs (So you can manipulate your GI user interface from Java on the server)
• Dojo Integration
  • Data Store (Keep a server side data store in sync with data in a client browser with both sides able to send updates. The data store also supports paging, sorting and filtering)
  • Packaging Integration (dojo.require all your DWR scripts)
• Server Support
  • Asynchronous servlet support for Tomcat and Glassfish
  • Improved Spring and Guice support
• Over the wire
  • JSONP support
  • JSON-RPC support
• Tech Previews
  • JMS Integration (Publish to the browser directly from JMS)
  • Jaxer Integration (Zero configuration for trusted environments)
• Infrastructure
  • SVN (We've moved from CVS to SVN)
  • Related Projects (Our repository contains a set of related projects including a number of demos)
• CLA (We've been through a legal review and have signed CLAs for dwr.jar)
• Dojo Foundation (We joined the Dojo Foundation and are now hosted by their servers)
• Better Documentation (DWR version 1.x had great docs. Version 2.x let things slide a bit, but we've dropped Drupal, and have our own system now)

There are also a bunch of things like better logging, error reporting and so on, but the full list would get quite dull. 2 things dropped out that we’d previously talked about: Bayeux Support and Gears Offline integration. We'll get to those, particularly Gears, soon.

I'm sure there will be lots of questions about how to use these features. Please don't ask in the comments; join the mailing list and ask there. As we roll out the new documentation system in the next week or so, all the details will be in there, and I'll then come back and link up this blog post.

You can download it now.

(Via Joe Walker’s Blog.)

FireUnit provides a simple JavaScript API for doing simple test logging and viewing within a new tab of Firebug.

The example given shows the API nicely:

// Simple true-like/false-like testing
fireunit.ok( true, "I'm going to pass!" );
fireunit.ok( false, "I'm going to fail!" );
 
// Compare two strings - shows a diff of the
// results if they're different
fireunit.compare(
  "The lazy fox jumped over the log.",
  "The lazy brown fox jumped the log.",
  "Are these two strings the same?"
);
 
// Compare a string using a regular expression
fireunit.reCompare(
  /The .* fox jumped the log./,
  "The lazy brown fox jumped the log.",
  "Compare a string using a RegExp."
);
 
// Display the total results
fireunit.testDone();
 
// -- browser events
 
// You can also simulate browser events
var input = document.getElementsByTagName("input")[0];
fireunit.mouseDown( input );
fireunit.click( input );
fireunit.focus( input );
fireunit.key( input, "a" );
 
// -- Run batches
 
// Or run multiple pages of tests:
fireunit.runTests("test2.html", "test3.html");
 
// Place at the end of every test file in order to continue
fireunit.testDone();

(Via Ajaxian » Front Page.)