JavaFX + Yahoo Placemaker + Maps

I have my travel itinerary or a document with list of cities, such as Seven Wonders of the World. I would like to retrieve the list of cities and the location information associated with it. How to do this??

Yahoo! released new Yahoo! Placemaker APIs. These APIs search for name of places in plain text document and returns the latitude and longitude associated with the place. You can either provide a text or a URL as input to the API. The output can be obtained in XML or RSS format.

Combine above information with Yahoo! Maps will return the maps associated with all places mentioned in specified document! Itn’t that cool?!

May be I must write more applications and publish at Java-Store!

For Applet mode, click on above image

For standalone mode

In above application we provide a URL which the Placemaker API will parse and returns the list of places. This information is given to Map Image API to retrieve the image. Any valid http URL can be provided as input. There is currently a 50 kbs limit for documents processed by Placemaker. Documents above this length are rejected and returns status 413. Please enter a new URL in textfield and press enter to load new places.

Source:

• Main.fx
• Place.fx
• XMLParser.fx

JavaFX – Skinnable Controls

Its long time since I blogged and lot of things happened during that time – Release of JavaFX 1.2, Java Store, New Samples… and lot more to write about! Let me start with UI Controls…

Following are some of the UI controls – Button, CheckBox, Hyperlink, Label, ListView, ProgressBar, ProgressIndicator, RadioButton, ScrollBar, Slider, TextBox, ToggleButton

The article on Node-Based Controls demonstrates its usage. So let me focus on how to update the skin of these controls.

The skin attribute of Control class allows you to associate a Skin. The Skin is responsible for implementing the user interface using on scene-graph nodes and defining the behavior of the control. The Behavior has the logic for handling key and mouse events.

Sounds complicated? confused? Control, Skin, Behavior.. For now lets look at a simple and straight forward way to just change the color and some basic attributes of Skin.

JavaFX already has a default skin implementation – Caspian. Its in com.sun.javafx.scene.control.caspian package. For each control, there is corresponding skin implementation. We can change few attributes of these skin implementations and customize the look of controls.

Example: To update skin of Button, we can customize the attributes of ButtonSkin implementation.

var button = Button {     text: "Button"     skin: ButtonSkin {         borderFill: Color.BLACK         focusFill: Color.BLUE         highlightFill: Color.GREEN         shadowFill: Color.GRAY         textFill: Color.RED         fill: Color.WHITE     } }

Similarly a TextBox can be customized as shown below:

var textBox = TextBox {     text: "TextBox"     skin: TextBoxSkin {         backgroundFill: Color.YELLOW         borderFill: Color.BLACK         caretFill: Color.BLUE         focusFill: Color.BEIGE         highlightFill: Color.BLUE         promptTextFill: Color.GRAY         selectedTextFill: Color.WHITE         shadowFill: Color.DARKGRAY         textFill: Color.BLACK     } }

More attributes and implementation is available in the source.
Try it out and let me know feedback!

Source:

• Main.fx
• SkinPalette.fx