Introduction # Recently, I posted an article titled, Should You Use FXML?. In that article, I stated that I felt that well written and organized code would always be easier to maintain than any corresponding FXML/FXML Controller would be. I did not emphasize this, as the article was intended to be a discussion about the merits and costs of using FXML more than as a “is this better than this?”, exploration.
Introduction # From time to time the question about, “To FXML or not to FXML” comes up on Reddit and other social media, and I’m know as being firmly in the “Not FXML” camp. I’ve had a few people message me about this, so I thought it might be a good time to examine this topic in depth.
If you are a beginner with JavaFX and are wondering, “What are all these Property things anyway?”, then this is the article for you. Besides the Properties themselves, we also cover the basics of using them with Bindings and Listeners. Read this article and you should have a good idea how to start out with JavaFX Properties.
This article is about the all of the typed observable classes and interfaces except the ones concerned with List.
You’ll find that all of the relationships and structure found in the generic classes is just about exactly the same, but then there are a few extra classes and interfaces added to the hierarchy depending on the type of data that they hold. We’ll concentrate mostly on two types, String and Integer here, because dealing with the others would just be redundant. String is typical of stand-alone types, and Integer is typical of types that are included in Number.
Introduction - Why Use a Framework? # Frameworks are all about organizing your application so that it will be easy to maintain, enhance and expand over time.
Here’s a sample application that uses a ListView to display and edit bytes in a data file, showing the values in hex, octal, binary, decimal and as characters.
An introduction to JavaFX Skins and Skinnable and how to create your own skin.
Introduction # OK, first off I know I’m swimming against the stream here, and at odds with things like this found in some of the tutorial pages from Oracle for JavaFX:
Introduction # This article is an introduction to and a “how to” for the framework that I’ve developed for building Reactive JavaFX applications. It’s called “Model-View-Controller-Interactor”, or just, “MVCI”.
Projects With Multiple Screens and Functions # One of the questions that seems to come up fairly often is about how to create a project that is composed of a number of different screens and functions.
Taking a look at the three most common design patterns for building systems with user interfaces. How are they different? which one is best? Is there anything better?
Maybe you’ve figured out how to build a working GUI that looks good. Now, how do you connect it to the rest of the world and make it do something?
The original Wordle is JavaScript in a browser, here’s an implementation of it in Reactive JavaFX written in Kotlin.
Pseudo Classes are the best way to handle on/off state changes in a Node in JavaFX. But it’s very badly explained in the JavaDocs and hard to understand. This article should clear that up.
Way, way back in 2014 when I started learning JavaFX, I tried using Scene Builder and FXML and found it to be an amazing waste of time and effort. One of the best decisions I ever made was to abandon it early on, and just code screens by hand. I advise everyone else to do the same.
How much code does it take to build a complete Hangman game in JavaFX?
It turns out … Not much!
Model-View-Controller is generally accepted as a good way to structure an application with a user interface. While JavaFX contains all of the classes needed to implement MVC in a natural and seamless way, it doesn’t seem to be widely documented and there’s little evidence on the Web that many people have figured out how to do it properly. The fact that JavaFX supports Reactive programming makes a big difference to how you should implement MVC.
A more in-depth look into how to build a TextFormatter that can be used to turn a TextField into sophisticated input field. We’ll look at designing a TextFormatter that is tailored to handle fixed place decimal input, using the decimal point itself as a control to toggle between the ordinal and mantissa of the number.
An introduction to TextFormatter, showing you how to integrate it into a TextField and how to use it to convert the input from String to some other kind of value. Then we’ll look at how to add a filter to prevent the user from entering invalid data.
MineSweeper! Everyone’s favourite time-waster Windows game. Implemented in JavaFX showing how the reactive nature of JavaFX can be used with MVC to create a game.
