Skip to main content

JavaFX - some later thoughts

I've been using JavaFX for a while now, in a couple of projects - for my PhD work, and on the side for Quelea (whose interface has been migrated entirely from Swing over to JavaFX.) As promised, I thought I'd post a few follow up thoughts - good points / bad points now that I've been using it a while.

So, without further ado, the positives!

  • The API is nice and clean - and not just because it's not stuffed with deprecated methods like Swing is, it's just designed in a fundamentally much more sensible way which makes it easier to follow. The concept of properties on elements, with these properties having a common interface, means I can jump right in with a component and see what properties are available to me without having to dig in the documentation to find out exactly how to add a listener for the width of the bottom half of my split pane (for instance.)
  • Layout is vastly improved - a lot of the swing inconsistencies have gone, and the model is now a specific component is tied to a specific layout (HBox, VBox, GridPane and so on) rather than having a separate content pane which can have a layout applied to it. This again ties in with the first point, making for a much easier, nicer API without having to wonder exactly what, if any parameters I need to shove on the end to get the layout manager which I've selected (and what one was it, anyway?) to behave.
  • You can actually do animations with keyframes without resorting to horrible graphics2d hacks - and it's all GPU accelerated.
  • Multimedia support comes as standard, no need to play around with the buggy as hell Javasound or JMF.
  • UI work on the platform thread is enforced most of the time - a runtime exception is thrown if you don't do this, which makes it much easier to find and solve odd annoying concurrency bugs that would often crop up otherwise.
  • The default cross platform skin doesn't make me want to vomit. On the contrary, it actually does a good job of looking rather nice across a range of platforms. It's visually appealing and nicely animated too.
  • Nice native deployment options - they only work on the current platform (i.e. you can't build a deb package on a windows box) but still, I like the change of thought that users are generally much more comfortable with a custom built package for their OS rather than a generic jar / jnlp file.
Despite the above, it's not flawless:
  • The multimedia support is great - when it works. But it supports in reality a very limited range of formats and file types (no mkv at all for instance, some of my mp4 encoded videos still didn't work either.)
  • There's still a few annoying bugs I've come across, such as this one. Nothing that can't be sorted, but these sorts of things are annoying.
  • Some features just aren't there yet - I wanted a pop up panel similar to the ColorPane, but those components just don't exist yet (or at least aren't part of the public API.)
  • No rich text on controls, at least not yet. This gets really annoying if you want to (for instance) bold part of a label. Can't be done, you have to butt multiple labels together in a HBox to get that effect (which, let's face it, is nasty.)
  • No native skins - you can write your own, but at the moment (as far as I know) none are provided to make it look like the native platform you're working on. Some would argue this is a good thing, but sometimes it's nice to have this option.
  • No damn font metrics in the public API - again, something I have to use an internal class for at present (which is really rather annoying and means code I write at present potentially isn't backwards compatible.)
Overall, I must admit I still like it, and while I've uncovered more things I don't like from my initial positive reaction, most of those things are slated for inclusion in Java 8 (so in a year or so at the time of writing.) I still don't think it's going to take off on the mobile or web front - but as a replacement for Swing on the desktop, it's a very welcome (and arguably long overdue) change.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The comprehensive (and free) DVD / Blu-ray ripping Guide!

Note: If you've read this guide already (or when you've read it) then going through all of it each time you want to rip something can be a bit of a pain, especially when you just need your memory jogging on one particular section. Because of that, I've put together a quick "cheat sheet" here  which acts as a handy reference just to jog your memory on each key step. I've seen a few guides around on ripping DVDs, but fewer for Blu-rays, and many miss what I believe are important steps (such as ensuring the correct foreign language subtitles are preserved!) While ripping your entire DVD collection would have seemed insane due to storage requirements even a few years ago, these days it can make perfect sense. This guide doesn't show you a one click approach that does all the work for you, it's much more of a manual process. But the benefits of putting a bit more effort in really do pay off - you get to use entirely free tools with no demo versions, it&
36 comments
Read more

Draggable and detachable tabs in JavaFX 2

JavaFX currently doesn't have the built in ability to change the order of tabs by dragging them, neither does it have the ability to detach tabs into separate windows (like a lot of browsers do these days.) There is a general issue for improving TabPanes filed here , so if you'd like to see this sort of behaviour added in the main JavaFX libraries then go ahead and cast your vote, it would be a very welcome addition! However, as nice as this would be in the future, it's not here at the moment and it looks highly unlikely it'll be here for Java 8 either. I've seen a few brief attempts at reordering tabs in JavaFX, but very few examples on dragging them and nothing to do with detaching / reattaching them from the pane. Given this, I've decided to create a reusable class that should hopefully be as easy as possible to integrate into existing applciations - it extends from Tab, and for the most part you create it and use it like a normal tab (you can just add it
7 comments
Read more

Dropbox Java API

This code will no longer work! It uses the old v1 API, which has been turned off. See here for working code with the latest v2 API. As well as being useful as general cloud storage, dropbox also has an API that lets you access its contents programmatically. It's a straightforward REST API with a number of language specific libraries to make the going a bit easier. Java is included on the list of SDKs, but at present only Android is included on the list of tutorials. This can be somewhat frustrating because simple examples using Java are lacking. Fortunately, the process was described by Josh here . So I've taken it and implemented it in Java, and it seems to work. It's a very basic example that authenticates with dropbox then uploads a file called "testing.txt" containing "hello world." Of course, more functionality is available than this, but this is the hard part (at least I found working this bit out the hard part.) Once you've got your Dro
112 comments
Read more