Rob Demmer Video: What is Project Nile?
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User Experience Designer Jeff Hoffman shows how to use the features of Project Nile, a component of the Java FX SDK Preview Release.
Project Nile is a suite of tools and plugins to enable scripters to take assets from design tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and to use them directly in their JavaFX applications.
Project Nile includes export plugins for Adobe products, an SVG graphic converter, a JavaFX graphics viewer, and samples.
Watch the video to see how everything fits together:
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Published at DZone with permission of its author, Rob Demmer.(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Jacek Furmankiewicz replied on Tue, 2008/08/26 - 7:22am
Quick question: why can't JavaFX provide an API to just read the native Adobe format without having to convert it to JavaFX data format? Wouldn't that be easier and more reusable?
Either way, I think it's was a very wise choice from Sun to focus on integrating with Adobe tools instead of coming up with their own. Good work there, guys.
Jeff Hoffman replied on Fri, 2008/08/29 - 1:58pm
in response to: Jacek
This is an excellent question, and there are some good reasons for introducing the JavaFX data format.
- JavaFX is intended to be small and quick, and will be deployed on desktops, mobile devices and TV set top boxes. We didn't want to bloat the language by providing APIs for all the known design tool formats like AI, PS, SVG, Flash and others that might appear in the future.
- The JavaFX format contains just the relevant information for creating a rich application.
- Adobe file formats don't all have up-to-date public specifications, so we wouldn't be able to fully read and support all the features there.
Design tools in general (and the Adobe tools, in particular) provide the ability to plug-in export filters for these reasons...so the designer can extract just the information needed for their application.Jacek Furmankiewicz replied on Fri, 2008/08/29 - 2:03pm
in response to: jhoff
Ah, that makes sense.
In that case I recommend maybe also some sort of batch/command line converter to enable batch conversion of existing Adobe-based graphics resources?
Any chance of a GIMP plugin for the same thing? (I know it's a low chance, but I thought I'd ask anyway....)