The latest version of the JavaFX SDK is out and available from the usual JavaFX.com downloads page. Looking at the release notes it's a bug fix release with a couple of tweaks for performance that include:

• Smaller JavaFX runtime download
• Faster startup times for JavaFX applications
• Improved reliability of JavaFX applications in Safari and Firefox on the Mac OS X
• Improved error handling

It appears there has been a slight change of heart for Project Kenai so ignore the previous post on Project Kenai shutting down to the public. It seemed it was destined for internal use in Oracle and users were told to move their projects before April 2nd but now the message has changed:

Our plan is to shut down kenai.com and focus our efforts on java.net as the hosted development community. We are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology. This means that any project currently hosted on kenai.com will be able to continue as you are on java.net.

If you have a project on kenai.com it might be best to stay put and wait to see how the migration goes. This decision by Oracle makes the most sense considering the amount of work that has gone into integrating the Project Kenai infrastructure with NetBeans.

On NetBeans Zone there has been a good three part series of articles about Neuroph, a Java framework for developing neural networks. Part 1 and part 2 focus on what neural networks are and what they are typically used for. Basically a neural network is a structured model of nodes that map input data to an output. The model changes as it assigns weights to the connections between the nodes based on a training process with a set of data.

What really caught my eye was part 3 on using a neural network for image recognition. There's a demo application called easyNeurons that makes trying out a neural network extremely simple. You can download the demo along with the Neuroph framework or just try it online. The instructions for creating a neural network for image recognition are fairly straightforward and I couldn't resist giving it a go.

I decided to use a set of Duke images. More specifically the ones of Read more...

One of the changes to come out of Oracle taking over Sun Microsystems was the switch to Project Kenai from a public facing website to a private project for internal use only. The end date for when this will happen has been posted on the Project Kenai website - April 2nd, 2010. If you have a public project on there that you want to keep, now is the time to move it to another host.

One of the projects I'm going to miss is the open source images of Duke. Hopefully they'll be switched to somewhere else in the near future or I might even stick them in a gallery on this site at some point.

EDIT: There's been a change of plans.