Enzo’s simple gauge in JFXtras
Gerrit Grunwald is an enspiring internet of things (IoT) evangelist and his JavaFX library ‘Enzo’ contains many visually attractive controls, well suited for IoT but also many other JavaFX applications. Gerrit used to be an active contributor to JFXtras, but he decided to move his work to his Enzo library. Why? Because the scope of JFXtras did not fit his needs.
As an IoT evangelist he develops many JavaFX controls for his demos, and he wants to get results fast; there is always that next conference in a few days. JFXtras on the other hand tries to uphold a certain quality by a.o. requiring tests to prevent regression. This is not something a roaming evangelist wants to invest his time in. So we end up with an interesting situation; great but risky controls! Examples of this are all the gauges that are part of JFXtras-labs 2.x: they were never ported to 8.x and thus all their users have a problem there. This of course is the risk of using anything from JFXtras-labs, it is after all JFXtras’ playground, with no guarantee what-so-ever.
So what now? Great controls but too risky to touch? For Enzo that may be the case, as Gerrit states on his blog; “Please keep in mind that all controls in that library are made for my personal demos and are not production ready”. However, Gerrit and I have an agreement that I’m allowed to become ‘inspired’ by (aka blatantly copy) his demos. This already happened with CornerMenu, which was inspired by one of Gerrit demo’s and spawned CircularPane and CirclePopupMenu. The next inspiration Gerrit gave me was his SimpleGauge.