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CellReference FormulaParsers FormulaException RichChar FormulaException TableUpdate FormulaError JTableMixin TableCellRenderer TableCellEditor AnyRef ValueChanged SpreadSheet SplitPane JTableMixin ListView TableHeader EmptyBorder LineBorder SystemColor TextField TableHeaderRenderer EditDone SwingConstants

Martin Odersky's book Programming in Scala ends with a demo spreadsheet application SCells. The example ends with a number of suggestions for improvements:

1. Make the spreadsheet resizable
2. Add new kinds of formulae
3. Prevent recursive cell references
4. Enhance error handling
5. Add formula entry at the top of the spreadsheet.
6. Add more functions

In addition to these improvements the SCells application could use some fixes, as it looks a bit ugly. Specifically

The JavaFX challenge is over and luckily I won a minor prize, but hey - congratulations to those who won big.

In fact congratulations to anyone who managed to submit an entry! My feeling is that JavaFX is still a bit premature and under developed.

I started out with the real goal of learning JavaFX and really seeing what it was up to, after all it is one thing reading about a technology and another actually using it. I also wanted to try out some things I thought would be a good fit for JavaFX. I ended up being very frustrated on a number of fronts.

Some of the core features are very nice, well implemented and simple to use. Take binding for instance, it is a really winner, saving lots of coding and making some idioms more intuitive. On the other hand things like layout resizing barely work, quite surprising when you recall the layout mantra that went with Swing.

Other features, like the Swing integration are dumbfounding and just downright disappointing, specially given the paucity of JavaFX components and widgets.

What No tooling???

A significant bug in the handling of styles has been fixed. The bug prevented styles being applied to generic component instances.

The idea of the styles was to support CSS like styles and a style for a class such as Button or Label could be created and applied to any instances of these components that did not explicitly specify a style. This is now fixed.

I've just contributed some text components to the SwingLabs project. These components allow text to be laid out in a manner akin to the way desktop publishing packages (DTP) can flow text around shapes, graphics and through columns.