JKstat, meet JavaFX

One of the announcements out of CommunityOne was the availability of JavaFX for Solaris and OpenSolaris - if you're lucky enough to be running on x86, anyway.

So the first thing that occurred to me was - could I use JavaFX to make a graphical front-end to JKstat?

(And the same thought occurred to Ben Rockwood as well, who asked me how easy it would be and pushed the thought from idle fancy to a must try, especially after I glibly said - "sure, dead easy".)



So the above image is jcpustate using the JKstat core api rendered with JavaFX. Of itself, it's nothing fancy, but it's served its purpose: I've got a rudimentary understanding of JavaFX out of it; I've worked out how to integrate JKstat amd JavaFX; and this validates that the JKstat core api does its job.

You can now download JKstat 0.29. Look in the jkstatfx directory, the source code for the above example is JCpuStateFX.fx.

I had a couple of issues getting this to work. I found I had to put the jni shared library (libkstat_jni.so) directly into the right javafx lib directory - setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH didn't seem to work. The other was that JavaFX doesn't natively support either java Collections or Generics. It clearly understands them - because it tracks the types of the objects in my Collections correctly (and it doesn't understand how to cast objects back toi the right type either). I ended up having to use the toarray(T[] a) method to create a Sequence of the right type.

I have to say that this wasn't the feature I had originally planned for this version of JKstat. I've been working on an interactive chart builder so you're not limited to the fixed and limited set of charts that JKstat creates on its own, but that will have to wait a while for the next release.