JavaFX1.2: Layout

Two Worlds Collide On the one hand, JavaFX's powerful scene-graph and animation engine enables gamer types to rapidly create dynamic visual scenes that are functionally expressed through binding and triggers and timelines. On the other, it's growing controls and charts libraries clearly stake out a more traditional GUI turf. As interfaces finally graduate to the 21st century, the lines between these two worlds is blurring in exciting ways. Our challenge is to evolve the FX platform to support this convergence, which speaks precisely to why layout in JavaFX is complicated enough that it requires a blog series to explain. So let's get down to business. With JavaFX1.2 there are two approaches to laying out your scene: app-managed: application directly sets the position and size of nodes and uses FX binding to express dynamic relationships. container-managed: application places nodes inside containers which manage their size/position according to preferences set on the containers and nodes. Typical JavaFX applications merrily blend both approaches, but before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's review a couple of core concepts that have arisen from our collision of purpose. Resizable vs. Not In JavaFX, every single visual element is represented by a stateful node in the scene graph. This means that the base javafx.scene.Node class needs to...

Date: September, 10 2009
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/aim/archive/2009/09/10/javafx12-layout

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