One of the gratifying things about being involved in building a new platform on top of a new language is discovering new language idioms. As an industry we’d managed to put together quite a long list of patterns and best practices for Java, but since JavaFX introduces some new concepts (such as object literal notation) and makes other things really easy to do (binding, closures) it creates an environment where we need to discover the best practices and patterns that make for effective programming in JavaFX.

One such idiom has to do with encapsulation. I was presented with the following problem in a recent email. The developer wanted to create a chunk of scenegraph which looked differently depending on some flag. There would be 10 such flags with 10 such chunks of scenegraph. (more…)