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Music Explorer FX Source Code Available

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Music Explorer FX has been open sourced and is available for download on the JFXtras community site (it’s about halfway down the page).  Thanks to Stephen Chin for encouraging me to release it under open source.

The netbeans project is included, so hopefully building it will be as straight-forward as opening the project. In order to run the application, you’ll need to get developer API keys from the Echo Nest, Flickr, and Last.fm (all free) and put them in src/api_keys.properties. The readme contains more detailed information.

The codebase was written in JavaFX 1.1, but I did update it to 1.2 so that it will work with the latest (at the time of this writing) release.

The code itself suffers from the proof-of-concept that turned into a prototype that grew into an application, while the author was learning a new language. Now that I’ve actually read a book on JavaFX, I can think of many things that I would have done differently.

In fact, as I write this, the current top post on dzone is a “you might be a bad programmer if…” type of post which seems to surface every few months, and reads like a check list for this application.

Rather than keep making excuses for poor code quality though, I’ll just cite the mantra that Jim Weaver aptly associated with the JFXtras community site back when it first launched: Working code trumps all theories.

Enjoy.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 10:49 pm and is filed under JavaFX, RIA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Music Explorer FX Source Code Available”

  1. Brian T. Grant wrote:
    August 8th, 2009 at 10:55 pm |

    Thanks for the source code, Sten! If there’s one thing I can’t get enough of, it’s reading your code :) All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to learning from the Music Explorer.
    - Brian

  2. Gene Chin wrote:
    September 21st, 2009 at 2:55 pm |

    Congratulations on winning the JavaFX Coding Challenge for this application. It’s cool to know that John & I were tutored by top notch talent.

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