Who are you and why did you do this?

I'm a senior consultant and an informal RIA Advocate for Citytech, Inc. and I wanted to build a non-trivial application in JavaFX to assess its viability for use in the wider world of "business application development".

If you think this application has merit and you would like to throw lots of money at us to develop your JavaFX application, or if you have no money, but would just like to relate your experience with the app, please feel free to contact me at sanderson att citytechinc dott com.

Is Music Explorer FX written in Flash?

No, it's actually written in JavaFX -- Sun's RIA platform.

Is this application like Pandora/Last.fm/Other?

Music Explorer FX is a tool for music discovery and as such offers recommendations based on your current artist. One of the ways that it differs from Pandora et al is by offering up to six recommendations per artist instead of a serial "one at a time" radio station style. It also keeps track of your artist history, which you can return to at any time.

I clicked on a link in "info" mode, but nothing happened.

If you're in fullscreen mode, the browser window probably opened in the background. Try toggling back to windowed mode (the button in the lower right corner).

Where do your recommendations come from? I can't find the artist I'm looking for. What is "hotness" anyway?

The vast majority of the data comes from the Echo Nest's public web services. Their developer docs will answer all of your questions. (More on the Echo Nest below).

Where does your data come from so I can write an app like this, only better!

The vast majority of the data comes from the Echo Nest's public web services. The Echo Nest is a Music 2.0 company with a strong developer community. Specifically, Paul Lamere, the director of the developer community has been extremely helpful getting this app off the ground.

While you're at it, can I have a list of all third party APIs that you used?

Sure thing:

• The Echo Nest API Java bindings which provide the bulk of the web service calls: http://code.google.com/p/echo-nest-java-api/
• Twitter4j (a set of Java bindings for the Twitter API) is used to tweet the user's music journey.
• The "Bare Bones Browser Launch for Java" (one source file) is used to open URLs in a browser in various parts of the application: http://www.centerkey.com/java/browser/

Why did I have to click through a security dialog? Can I really trust you?

Music Explorer FX requires "full access" from the Java Security Manager for the following reasons:

• It makes several web services calls (Echo Nest, Twitter).
• It launches the user's default browser to view URLs
• It creates a directory in the user's home directory to write a cache file ("user.home"/.MusicExplorerFX/cache.dat) for the Echo Nest data (this code is part of the Echo Nest Java API).

My performance is less than stellar. Any suggestions?

MEFX is fairly graphics intensive (lots of simultaneous animations, fades, transparencies, blends, blooms, etc.). The machines that perform the best (I've noticed) generally have at least mid-range nVidia graphics cards.

Also, MEFX is built on JavaFX, which is a very new technology (as of this writing it is less than nine months old). In my evaluation of it I've noticed that performance isn't always up to par with other modern UI toolkits. However, the JavaFX team is pushing out new, faster versions at regular intervals, so hopefully it will only get better.

Can I have the source code?

There is an open source version of MEFX at the JFXtras community website.

How do I stay tuned for updates?

You can bookmark this page and check back every so often, or you could make my day and subscribe to my blog at http://blogs.citytechinc.com/sanderson/, where I'll be sure to announce any changes. So go ahead...make my day.

I have a question/comment/suggestion/bug. How can I contact you?

You can email me at: sanderson att citytechinc dott com, but if it's a bug you're reporting, please check the known issue list first.