JavaFX 2.0

[Stephen Winnall]

Hi Tobi

Thanks for your reply. I agree that JavaFX is a very promising successor to Swing, especially because of the flexibility provided by FXML and CSS. However, I'd argue that these are not enough to provide a completely natural experience on any platform. CSS may help with the LOOK but not with the FEEL. Certain features may consist of completely different controls, depending on the target platform: CSS doesn't help you with that.

The following are some common examples where there are going to be issues (from a Mac point of view):

	popup dialogues (sheets on a Mac)
	file chooser
	invocation of use cases (menus, toolbars, ribbons (?) in Windows 7)
	host system message handling (app invocation)
	host system file conventions
	standard layouts
	standard icons
	standard use cases (preferences, help, about, check for update, …)
	invocation of platform-specific CSS, FXML, properties, …

To make it easier to write *well-behaved* apps which run anywhere, all the above choices need to be hidden from the application programmer. Swing never got anywhere near to providing this and JavaFX is not there yet.

Cheers
Steve

On 29 Feb 2012, at 09:13, Tobias Bley wrote:

> Hi Steve,
> 
> I'm very impressed of Java FX 2.1 and we are thinking about creating new applications with JavaFX instead of Swing. But a big problem in our point of view is the missing native skin support (css). So the caspian skin (caspian.css) looks very good, but  I want to develop native looking apps for the AppStore for instance, I need a native looking css file (skin aka Look and Feel). 
> 
> Currently there is no such native looking skin but I think it's not very difficult to do that. All you have to do is the adjust the JavaFX2.1 default skin file (caspian.css). You'll find a good starting point here: http://fxexperience.com/2011/12/styling-fx-buttons-with-css/
> 
> It's an example of styling native looking buttons (e.g. Windows7, Mac OS X, iPad, iPhone, ...) with pure css.
> 
> The best approach to develop native skins for Windows and Mac OS X seams to be to take the swing approach (query colors, fonts, backgrounds and so on from the OS theme) and use it in conjunction with JavaFX' skin approarch (css file, FX skin class, bevaviour, components....)
> 
> Best regards,
> Tobi
> 
> 
> -- 
> Tobias Bley
> Chief Executive Officer
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
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> 
> UltraMixer Digital Audio Solutions
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> --------------------------------------------------------
> bley at ultramixer.com   http://www.ultramixer.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 28.02.2012 um 23:54 schrieb Stephen Winnall <steve at winnall.ch>:
> 
>> I'm looking at JavaFX 2.1 and especially how to make JavaFX applications behave well under Mac OS X. It occurred to me that much of the work done on AWT and Swing for Mac OS X could be reused for JavaFX.
>> 
>> Is this a realistic assumption? If so, could someone point me in the right direction? I'm not entirely clear as to what has been released to OpenJDK and what not.
>> 
>> Steve
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
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