Extending Builders: Layout Builders

[Daniel Zwolenski]

They can be difficult to google thanks to "Scene Builder" hogging the
google-sphere.

Builders are basically convenience factories for building Nodes. Michael
Heinrichs gives a good view on builders here:
http://blog.netopyr.com/2012/01/24/advantages-of-javafx-builders/

They aren't really specific to FXML but FXML makes use of them to simplify
the XML syntax and add convenience methods to Node classes. There's a bit
of mention of them in the FXML docco:
http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/api/javafx/fxml/doc-files/introduction_to_fxml.html#class_instance_elements

There's a bit more of a clue on how to use them in this:
http://jayskills.com/blog/2012/04/12/add-custom-components-to-fxml-using-builderfactory/

I haven't followed all of this conversation but I suspect builders could do
the sort of syntactic sugar you wanted.

>From the sounds of it, builders possibly could be used to simplify the
MigPane code too (but I haven't looked and from a user's perspective, what
you've done works fine).




On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Tom Eugelink <tbee at tbee.org> wrote:

> On 2012-11-27 01:51, Richard Bair wrote:
>
>> But I'd rather use a different approach: provide (de)serializers that
>>> help map the FXML onto the objects. I see FXML as a layer on top of the API
>>> and good software development teachings say that lower layers should not
>>> have any knowledge of higher layers, so I feel really really bad about
>>> polluting the Java API to support FXML. Providing glue might be a better
>>> approach. Java has standard plugin-style solutions in place, like
>>> META-INF/services, so it should be easily possible to provide plugins
>>> together with the components that help in those places where simple
>>> serialization does not cut it.
>>>
>> Isn't this the role that the builders already play in the FXML
>> deserialization routine? My understanding was that people would be able to
>> create custom builders for their classes (and we could provide custom
>> builders for ours) such that you would be able to map such things from the
>> FXML?
>>
>>
> I don't know. This is the first time I've heard of FXML builders,
> otherwise I would have used them for MigPane. I did not find anything on
> the google, do you have a reference to some documentation or example?
>
> Tom
>