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I made a project ("lunchbus") to play with Spring Boot + websockets + AngularJS 1.5 + Groovy + Redis. This may be interesting to those who are interested to see how these are set up. The project also has the configuration to run on Heroku.

The lunchbus app keeps track of who owes lunches and to whom, a list of people and places that can be selected, a button to randomly select a place, a chat functionality, and a demonstration of high-speed log output from backend. Persistence is provided by Redis. Due to how it uses Redis, it's just almost ready for horizontal scaling with multiple servers, for that time that you have over 100,000 people going to lunch with you. All that's needed for that is to integrate Spring Boot to Redis pubsub.

My goal is to learn Spring Boot and websockets primarily, and also to see what does an application relying solely on websockets look like and its strengths/weaknesses.

The jalleg binding for Allegro covers essentially the entire library now, with all of the major parts tested. It is at the point I believe it is good enough to start using. Any feedback is appreciated, and if no issues arise, I will probably make a 0.1 release, although the binding itself is more like "1.0 beta". The library has been tested on both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) at this point. I've also set up a wiki page on getting started in Windows and Linux.

There are a few examples but the default one that runs is a ball and paddle game using a handful of Allegro features:

• Display and primitives addon
• Font addon for scores
• Keyboard: A/Z left player, up/down right player
• Mouse: click where you want the paddle to be
• Joystick: controls the right player
• Haptics addon: if you have for example XBox controller as your joystick, you get rumble effect when ball hits
• Audio addon: sound effects generated by square waves

jalleg is a JVM binding for Allegro 5.2 to be used by any JVM language (Java obviously, but also other languages such as Groovy, Kotlin, JavaScript, Scala, Jython, JRuby, and Clojure).

I've just put up a new repository for those interested in following the progress. Currently I have a working but not fully tested JNA-based binding auto-generated by JNAerator.

Allegro was a library I originally worked with a lot when I was learning C/C++ development in DOS in the late 1990s, and has always had a special meaning to me. Allegro 5 is a modern, cross-platform variation of the library supporting hardware rendering and even mobile development. Allegro is a simple library to use and programming a game is a great way to get into learning programming. My hope is that jalleg expands the Allegro fun to Java and all the JVM languages.

jalleg is on GitHub

Version 1.0 of JFXUtils is released now.

JFXUtils is now available on Maven Central, so no custom repository settings are needed! The maven coordinates for this release are org.gillius:jfxutils:1.0.

A special thanks goes to gforman44, who contributed a lot of code and ideas for this release and encouraged me to finish to 1.0. Also thanks go to Daniel Weil for bug fixes.

You can find more information at the GitHub Project Page.

Continue reading for the full list of changes.