webtechie.be

A New Website for MelodyMatrix, and What's New in Release 1.1.0

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week was busy for MelodyMatrix . The website got rebuilt from the ground up, and the app itself got a solid release with a handful of new features.

My Book 'Java Programming for Raspberry Pi' is Now Available as Softcover and Hardcover on Amazon

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Java Programming for Raspberry Pi: A Hands-On Guide to Electronics and IoT Projects” is now available as a softcover and hardcover paper book through Amazon, on top of the Kindle ebook and the pay-as-you-wish version on Leanpub . If you prefer holding a physical book while you’re wiring up LEDs and sensors on your Raspberry Pi, that’s now possible again.

Closing the Visual Gap Between the Official Lottie Webplayer and Lottie4J

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Lottie library is only as good as its output looks. If an animation renders differently in Lottie4J than it does in the official web player, that’s a bug, even when no exception is thrown and the code looks correct.

JavaFX Links of June 2026

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here are the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of June 2026. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com . Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com .

From breadboard chaos to a real PCB: designing the Pi4J smoke test board

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Testing a Java I/O library properly means testing it on real hardware. No mocks, no stubs, just actual pins doing actual things. For Pi4J, that means running the smoke test: a setup with two BMP/BME280 sensors, some GPIO-to-GPIO jumper connections, and a bunch of patience while you untangle the wires for the third time this week.

JavaFX In Action #27 with David Gutierrez about JMathAnim to Create Mathematical Animations

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The JFX Central Links Of The Week is a great source to discover what is happening in the JavaFX world. One of the projects that caught my eye is JMathAnim, a tool to create mathematical animations built on top of JavaFX. In this interview, David Gutierrez, a mathematician from Spain, walks us through what the project can do and how it came to life.

Foojay Podcast #99: Testing the Untestable, LLM Security for Java Developers with Tiberius

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Unit testing assumes that the same input gives the same output. Large language models break that assumption on purpose, which leaves Java developers wiring LLMs into their applications without a clear way to test for security issues, bias, or prompt injection. Tiberius is an open-source library that tackles exactly this problem, treating non-determinism as part of the design rather than a bug to work around.

A Fresh Design for webtechie.be

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This website grew over many years into more than 260 posts, 220 videos, 100 podcasts, and 60 presentations. The old design buried most of that under a layout that no longer matched the way I write today. So I rebuilt it from the ground up, and the result puts the content first.

Foojay Podcast #98: The End of JNI Pain, How WebAssembly Is Quietly Replacing Native Libraries in Java

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

JNI has been the standard answer for calling native code from Java for almost three decades. It also brings most of the headaches anyone who has wrestled with it remembers: brittle bindings, crashes that take the JVM down with them, painful cross-platform builds. WebAssembly quietly changes the shape of that problem. You get a sandboxed runtime, a portable binary format, and a far gentler integration path into the JVM.

Lottie4J Meets LottieFiles: A Conversation with Naail Abdul Rahman

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lottie animations run on Android, iOS, and the web. Getting them working on the JVM is a different story. Lottie4J started as a question: can JavaFX render them without a WebView? That question turned into a library with a first release in March 2026! Since then, I received the first pull requests, recently added headless unit testing with JavaFX 26, and now this: a video conversation with Naail from the LottieFiles team.

Foojay Podcast #97: From Scripting Language to AI Powerhouse with BoxLang

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you write Java day to day, the AI tooling conversation often defaults to Python. BoxLang takes a different route. It runs on the JVM, treats AI as a first-class concern, and lets you mix dynamic templating with the libraries you already trust.

JavaFX Links of May 2026

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here are the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of May 2026. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com . Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com .

Foojay Podcast #96: Local AWS Development Without LocalStack: Meet Floci, the GraalVM-Powered Alternative

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Running AWS services on your laptop usually means waiting for a heavy emulator to boot, watching memory fill up, and hoping the API behavior matches the real cloud. Floci takes a different path. It spins up 35 AWS services in about 25 milliseconds with 13 megabytes of memory, using a single Docker command. In this episode we sat down with Hector Ventura, the creator of Floci, for Foojay Podcast #96.

Is Your Java App Actually Secure, Or Does It Just Look That Way?

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your Java app passes the build, the tests are green, and the dashboard looks fine. But are the libraries underneath still maintained, or are they quietly collecting vulnerabilities? In this episode we dig into “zombie dependencies”, the CVE process, and the small habits that make a real difference. I host Steve Poole and David Welch from HeroDevs for Foojay Podcast #95.

Foojay Podcast #94: More Than a Blog: How Foojay Connects, Sustains, and Evolves the Java Community

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What keeps a developer community alive after six years, and what does it take to stay relevant while AI reshapes how we write code? For Foojay’s sixth anniversary, we gathered a crowd of voices from across the Java world to answer those questions in their own words. We talked with Sharat Chandar, Markus Westergren, Iryna Dohndorf, René Schwietzke, Gerrit Grunwald, Catherine Edelveis, Jago de Vreede, Annelore Egger, Buhake Sindi, François Martin, Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka, and Geertjan Wielenga in Foojay Podcast #94.

JCast: Van Commodore 64 tot Java Champion: code begrijpelijk maken

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Code only helps people when they can read it, run it, and understand what it does. That same idea applies to documentation, to teaching kids how to program, and to the way developers talk about their work. On JCast, hosts Viktor Van Steenweghen, Oumaima Zerouali, and Maarten Casteels sit down with guest Frank Delporte for a Dutch-language conversation about Java, writing, and the people behind the keyboard.

JavaFX Links of April 2026

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here are the JavaFX LinksOfTheMonth of April 2026. You can find the weekly lists on jfx-central.com . Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to have included in one of the next overviews? Let us know via links@jfx-central.com .

Links from the JCON talk 'Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API on Raspberry Pi'

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

These are the links from the JCON talk in Cologne, Germany, on April 22, 2026: “The Wait is Over: Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API brings modern Java to the Raspberry Pi ”.

Debugging BentoFX in MelodyMatrix with Matt Coley, Scenic View, and an Honest Look at AI-Generated Code

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are bugs you can solve by yourself, and bugs where you just need to sit down with someone who knows the internals. This video is in the second category. MelodyMatrix uses BentoFX for its dockable panel layout. Branches, leaves, tabs on the side, content panels that open and close. It works well until something fights the layout. But I had some visual problems I could not explain, some code that felt more complicated than it should be, and no good explanation for why.

Testing Lottie4J JavaFX Animations in GitHub Actions Without a Display: JavaFX 26 Headless to the Rescue

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I released Lottie4J 1.1.0 , I mentioned something a bit embarrassing in the release notes and this blog post : there was a new unit test to compare the JavaFX player output against a JavaScript reference player, but it “can not run on CI, because it requires a display output.” A TODO. A known limitation. One of those notes you write hoping future-you will figure it out.