I was looking for a JavaFX display shelf control (similar to the iTunes cover flow) that I could use for some WidgetFX GUI improvements.  I couldn’t find anything that met my needs, so I rolled my own.  Some of the design goals included:

• Extreme scalability – WidgetFX supports image lists of up to 10,000 in size (possibly more in the future), so performance had to be independent of list size.
• Ultra-high performance – If your GUI is slow, users assume your whole application is slow, so this had to be tuned for maximum performance (and minimum resource usage).
• Visual appeal – Let’s face it, this is an eye-candy control, so if the graphics, transitions, and effects are not breathtaking, it is a failure.

I put together a quick screencast of the finished product (this is the first of many screencasts I will be putting together, so let me know how I can improve it — better audio is already on my short list):

Keith was my co-conspirator on this project and you can thank for the fine selection of Anime images in the demo.

The Shelf control includes the following features:

• Image Titles – Images can optionally have titles that are shown below them on the shelf.
• ScrollBar – Quick navigation of the list via a scroll bar that can be enabled or disabled.
• Reflection – Supports a reflection effect that can be enabled or disabled
• Configurable aspect ratio – The aspect ratio of the images in the list can be set based on the type of images loaded. The default value is 1:1 (square).
• Intelligent caching – Uses Soft References to cache images that are off-screen. This will save images up to available memory, and free the least recently used images on garbage collection.

You can find the full source code as well as a runnable web start demo on the JFXtras Samples project web site here:

JFXtras Shelf Control Demo

Speaking of JFXtras Samples, it is a new open repository of JavaFX samples targeted at teaching the language and APIs.  JFXtras Samples is designed to be complementary to blogs such as this, by providing a searchable archive with full source access.  Please join the community and post your samples by following the instructions here:

Guide to Uploading Samples

There are lots of little good nuggets in the Shelf implementation, such as rotation effects, image caching, and render cycle optimizations, so if there is interest, I will post a more detailed making-of-blog at steveonjava.com…