Extending Builders: Layout Builders (original) (raw)

Daniel Zwolenski zonski at gmail.com
Mon Nov 26 22:51:11 PST 2012

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

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