Comments on: Skinning Architecture in JavaFX

By: alex

alex — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:04:51 +0000

All fair points apart from the bit about XML. The widespread use of XML alongside Java is precisely because Java is so bad for programming in a declarative style. JavaFX fixes that. Why would you use an irritatingly verbose document format to write programs in lieu of a purpose-built declarative programming language? His trivial example looks fine but doesn’t contain any code to perform actions, only declarative layout code. How would they propose to encode that in XML? XML makes a bad programming language as someone who is worked on a moderately compliated Ant build will testify.

By: hendrik

hendrik — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:01:44 +0000

Thanks for the info! Helped me a lot.

hendrik

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:29:20 +0000

Hi,

thanks so much for the interesting article. I like to use the style attribute to change the CSS, but I cannot find the caspian css anywhere.

Where to I find a description / the caspian style sheet with an overview of the tags that are available, i.e. where do I find out about the tags such as “base: red” and “border-width:0″ ?

Thanks a lot in advance
Frank

By: Martin Brehovsky

Martin Brehovsky — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:00:49 +0000

Jo, what we have shown at J1 this year was this:

Button { skin: FXDSkin { url: “{__DIR__}myskin.fxz” }}. The fxz file contained graphics for all states supported by the skin (disabled, enabled, armed and hover in our case). It worked reasonably well, although I believe we need to add more support to allow tweaking the state transitions (we used simple crossfade).

Also one idea is the designer would be able to mark graphics as a button directly in AI, thus the exported FXD would already contain the skinned button.

By: Jo Voordeckers

Jo Voordeckers — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:04:05 +0000

Thanks for clarifying, it’s even better then what I was hoping for.

The CSS animated 9-patch styling would be something most designers would use, quite similar to what they use in the web world.

Support for skinning the individual control states in the ProductionSuite would be a big plus, even if we’d have to assemble the pieces manually. You’d have to do it only once for every component, and the IDE could probably help with this task like Netbeans did with generating UIStubs from FXDs in the 1.1 release.

Keep the good stuff comming!