[REVIEW REQUEST] RT-25325 Controls should be hardcoded to their default skin in case -fx-skin is not specified in CSS

[steve.x.northover at oracle.com]

So the idea is not to use CSS at all and to reset the default skin?
Could we support "default" as a value for -fx-skin instead?
Can you give a simple example of how createDefaultSkin() would be used?

Steve

On 21/11/2012 3:25 PM, Jonathan Giles wrote:
> Jasper and I have been speaking about this recently, so from my point 
> of view as tech lead inside the UI controls team I believe this is a 
> good move - it speeds up instantiation time (less use of the costly 
> reflection) and it allows for easier styling, both of which Jasper has 
> outlined below. These are both good wins.
>
> The other big perk is that we can release more samples code without 
> referring to private API (that is, the skins we use to style our 
> controls).
>
> -- Jonathan
>
> On 22/11/2012 9:17 a.m., Jasper Potts wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> When building applications we often want to remove and replace all 
>> the default styling from a control but still use the default skin. To 
>> do this so far you had to respecify the default skin in your css file 
>> with something like
>>
>> .my-button {
>>     -fx-skin: "com.sun.javafx.scene.control.skin.ButtonSkin";
>> }
>>
>> The problem with this is the skins are in a com.sun package so not 
>> public API and may change in the future. So what I propose doing is 
>> adding new protected method to Control class so that sub-classes can 
>> create instances of their default skin.
>>
>> public abstract class Control{
>> …...
>>      /**
>>       * Create a new instance of the default skin for this control. 
>> This is called to create a skin for the control if
>>       * no skin is provided via CSS {@code -fx-skin} or set 
>> explicitly in a sub-class with {@code  setSkin(...)}.
>>       *
>>       * @return  new instance of default skin for this control. If 
>> null then the control will have no skin unless one
>>       *          is provided by css.
>>       */
>>      protected Skin<?> createDefaultSkin() ….
>> ….
>> }
>>
>> The reason for returning a instance rather than class name string is 
>> it speeds up start up to not have to do the reflection to lookup and 
>> instantiate the class from classname. It would have been nice if this 
>> could have been a abstract method but that would have not been 
>> backwards compatible.
>>
>> All existing code will work as it does not but any css specifying the 
>> default skin can now be removed when running on 8.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Jasper
>