Controls with Values [was Possible additions to JavaFX to facilitate forms and validations]

[Jim Graham]

OK, time for a graphics nerd to put his foot in his mouth and try to 
sound less than dim-witted in a Controls discussion... <crosseyed smiley>

It feels like the proposals here are heading in the direction of FX 
owning the data.  That's great for applications that never do anything 
other than display the data on a single FX-capable screen, but I can 
imagine more complicated applications for whom screen display is only 
one of their goals/modes of use.

Consider an application that is meant to view a database.  When 
displaying it on the screen the data needs to be managed by both the 
database and the FX nodes, but the FX nodes don't really own the data 
there, that is just one way to manage that part of the interaction. 
Meanwhile there may be back end modes of this application that run as 
network services to manage updates to this database through web or net 
services.  It may have a command line interface for batch processing. 
It may have an HTML5 back end for displaying on devices that don't yet 
support FX.  It may want to support displaying the database on multiple 
screens or in multiple views on the same screen.

I don't think the proposals for Controls to "be" properties will 
necessarily preclude any of that, but would it be more natural for 
Controls to talk to a property that is owned by the application?  In 
other words, TextFoo is a Control that takes a Text property, it is not 
itself a text property.  And when you do data binding, you would be 
binding the raw properties that the application manages, not the Control 
nodes.  And when you have multiple views on the same data open then you 
don't have to have a cloud of self-important nodes that all believe they 
own the data that needs to be coordinated so they all make sure they own 
the same version of the data as each other...

Or am I off base here?

			...jim