Supporting the Mac OS menubar in JavaFX (original) (raw)

Richard Bair richard.bair at oracle.com
Fri Dec 9 17:57:22 PST 2011

Ya, that's the bummer. We exactly designed the menus for the exact usage Jim describes, but didn't put them in a suitable package for modularization. Drat!!!

On Dec 9, 2011, at 4:38 PM, Jonathan Giles wrote:

Just as a further data point to what Jim is saying: the javafx.scene.control.Menu* classes (MenuItem, and subclasses Menu, RadioMenuItem, CheckMenuItem, CustomMenuItem and SeparatorMenuItem) are not actually Controls. The only Menu* class that is a Control is MenuBar.

From this perspective, it is actually unfortunate that these non-Control classes actually live in javafx-ui-control, as they may be totally suitable in the abstract sense that Jim discusses. -- -- Jonathan

On Saturday, 10 December 2011 10:19:00 a.m., Jim Graham wrote: If this was simply a skinning technique of "moving the Stage's menubar to the screen's menubar" that works if you have a window open, but it doesn't solve the problem of what happens when you have no windows open when Mac applications typically still manifest menus in the screen menubar. Sticking a "separate but equal" menubar somewhere would lead to applications failing to look like native Mac apps until the developers are made aware of the issues and require "extra" coding to deal with Mac deployment. If we could provide a way to specify: - Here are the menubar items that apply to all windows. - Here are the additional menubar items that apply to a specific window. - To be most flexible, the "additional items" might have to be additional items in the top-level menus that were specified for all windows - Would there also be a need to specify "but not these items" for some windows to delete some items that only make sense when no windows are open? Then it would be both an API for letting the runtime know which menubar items should remain after the last window closes on Mac, and a way to be able to populate lots of window menubars when an application has multiple windows. The actual manifestation of the menubar would be a control, but the specification of what items are needed could be in an independent format that doesn't bring in a whole new package. We could create skeleton "menu-ish-bar-ish-item" classes in the application package and those could be the data that the Menu* controls take, but one could attach a list of those to an Application object without having Application depend on controls. A Stage could then take an additional list and combine it with the list on the Application to make the full menu bar list which is then skinned by the controls. When no windows are open, then the Mac-specific application could still skin them in a native skin and deploy them on the screen menubar, or have a hidden dependency on the controls for that platform only. That's a fairly loose conceptual hand-waving outline, but maybe it could dislodge a more concrete design from someone more familiar with how all of those objects interact? ...jim On 12/9/2011 3:46 PM, steve.x.northover at oracle.com wrote:

Many toolkits have supported portabilitly between Mac and Windows (and other operating systems that put the menu bar in the window) by swapping the menu bar on stage focus in and out. This is what SWT does. Recently, an app wide menu bar was added to support the Mac. Steve On 09/12/2011 6:34 PM, Tom Schindl wrote:

[...]

Another place to specify a MenuBar would be on Stage, rather than (or in addition to), Application. Having a MenuBar property on Stage would allow for the MenuBar to change based on the currently focused Stage - but I'm not certain this is desirable or even the expected behaviour of Mac OS. Therefore, I'm thinking that this is not likely to happen unless we hear otherwise. Well the menu changes definately based upon the focused top-level window. So I'm quite sure the MenuBar has to be specified on the Stage not? I'm wondering though how you'd like to support all the themeing stuff one is able to apply on menus/menuitems on OS-X. IIRC I recently read in a mail from Mike Swingler that one can implement arbitary Java Drawing post-Leopard but I'm not sure that matches the OS-X Menubar idea and all the fancy things one can do with JavaFX. Tom

More information about the openjfx-dev mailing list