JavaFX 2.0

[Stephen Winnall]

Hi Richard

Where can I read about all of this? Most of the documentation I've seen in the net explains the how rather than the what and the why of JavaFX. An example: the Javadoc for FileChooser doesn't mention that file dialogs are (should be?) native. Or: dialogues are work in progress (I think). Where can I read about that and the associated design goals?

I hope I'm not being hypercritical: I'm just very enthusiastic about JavaFX 2.x. The people working on the project are also clearly very good at what they're doing and extremely helpful in mailing lists, JIRA and so on. 

What I'm missing is a sense of where it is worth while for me to develop stuff myself and where I should wait for project development to run its course.

Cheers
Steve

On 29 Feb 2012, at 16:16, Richard Bair wrote:

> Hi Steve (moved to OpenJFX-dev)
> 
>> 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.
> 
> This actually has been our design center, to separate the look from the feel, to maintain platform specific feel but allow for non-standard look.
> 
>> 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
> 
> The file dialogs should all be native. Dialogs (when added) should be sheets.
> 
>>   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, …
> 
> A lot of these issues are, I think, app framework responsibilities (other than menus where we already in 2.1 have native Mac menu bar integration), but they are all good. If we're DOA on being able to support these things I'd like to know so we can fix them.
> 
> The SceneBuilder tool is our first use case, it uses native file choosers and Mac menu bar etc.
> 
> Cheers
> Richard
> 
>> 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