JavaFX on Android and iOS: One of Oracle’s ongoing projects is getting JavaFX onto the two big smartphone platforms. An update from Richard Bair (Chief Architect Client Java at Oracle) says the work is now at “a good prototype stage”. There’s “funky” code swapping JavaFX text fields for native components and the plan is to build a more layered system for better native look and feel without Swing style theming. But Bair also notes that currently its all hands on deck for Java 8. If you are wondering about whether there’s a JVM on iOS, things point towards the open source RoboVM which compiles Java bytecode the ARM or x86.
Firefox’s Java Blackout: And if you are having trouble (or your users are) with Java applications that work with Firefox, then the short story is that Mozilla have marked the Java plugin as unsafe by default. You’ll find the bug and angry comments in the Mozilla Bugzilla and you’ll want to refer to “How to enable Java if it’s been blocked”. Unfortunately, Mozilla’s security UI design is “special” and so you’ll need to look at the red “lego brick” icon in the address bar to allow Java to run. And remember to UPDATE YOUR JAVA now - Latest versions is Java 7 update 45. And if you don’t use applets or Web Start, leave it disabled. Mozilla’s policy good, fire^h^h^h^h Mozilla’s communication skills bad.
Amazon Audio Transcode: Amazon’s Elastic Transcoder now does audio as well as video. Save content up on S3, select presets, let rip and let the results land back on the S3 storage service. The free AWS tier gives you the ability to transcode 20 minutes a month for free, though this does appear to be a little mean - for video you get 20 minutes of SD content a month which, paid for in the EU data centre, costs $0.017 per minute, while audio costs $0.00522 per minute. Still, equine dental hygiene inspection is unbecoming and they do support transcoding audio to AAC, MP3 and Vorbis.
Extra snippings: Fun with internal Java classes and NetBeans, translate SQL to MongoDB with QueryMongo, why you should support only Android 4.0 and above and how to make an iBeacon using a Raspberry Pi and a Bluetooth dongle.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog