JavaFX 2.0

[Stephen Winnall]

Hi Tobi

I agree entirely about MacWidgets, Quaqua and the adaptations to Swing made by Apple. But they were clever Mac-specific hacks to compensate for the flawed original design of Swing: Sun seemed to think Metal would be OK on all platforms so didn't develop a multi-platform strategy, or so it seems to me.

I originally wrote to macosx-port-dev to ask how to get at the good stuff that Mike Swingler and friends wrote to repurpose it for JavaFX, if that is possible (legally and technically).

I think JavaFX needs an appropriate multi-platform abstraction layer with specific implementations for significant platforms. One would be Mac OS X, but Windows and Linux users have a right to well-behaved UIs too. Note my use of "multi-platform" as opposed to "cross-platform". Applications should be cross-platform (written once), but built on multi-platform frameworks (one per platform) so they behave well.

I'm trying to get this message across to the JavaFX team: perhaps they have already implemented this approach, but I don't see it and don't know who to talk to about it.

Gruss aus Stallikon (Vorort von Zürich)
Steve

On 29 Feb 2012, at 11:16, Tobias Bley wrote:

> Hi Steve, (from Zürich ;))
> 
> I absolutely agree with you. The FEEL ist important too. But JavaFX comes with technologies to change the look (css) AND the feel (Behavior classes). So it's possible to emulate the native user interface.
> 
> Currently there are good projects to do that in Swing like macwidgets (http://code.google.com/p/macwidgets/) or Quaqua (http://www.randelshofer.ch/quaqua/) and the excellent swing implementation of Apples JDK (thanks Mike ;)). So I think It's very important to start such a OS specific project for JavaFX too.
> 
> Best regards from Germany,
> Tobi
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Tobias Bley
> Chief Executive Officer