Book Image

JavaFX 1.2 Application Development Cookbook

By : Vladimir Vivien
Book Image

JavaFX 1.2 Application Development Cookbook

By: Vladimir Vivien

Overview of this book

JavaFX Script enables you to easily create rich Internet applications by embedding multimedia components. Although you can create stylish Internet applications by modifying these default components, even advanced users find it challenging to create impressive feature-rich Internet applications with JavaFX. Also, there are limited JavaFX components to work with and by default these components don't look visually appealing.This book explores limitless possibilities to style your application by coding JavaFX components to display your content in a more appealing fashion. The recipes in this book will help you to create customized JavaFX components with which you can make modern, feature-rich applications.First, you will be introduced to the JavaFX SDK and other development tools available to help you be productive during development. You will create an application in JavaFX by arranging complex graphical components (and non-graphical libraries) with simplified declarative constructs. You will then explore the fun side of JavaFX by using transformation techniques to manipulate the location and dimensions of objects. The next chapter is about the GUI components that are available in the framework, which provide a high level of interactivity. You will learn how to use the media component to play media content. Then we will access data and manipulate data locally or remotely. You will explore many deployment options and integration tips and tricks to take advantage of runtime contexts. Finally, you will interact with pure Java code to read and write files in JavaFX and to establish interactions with computing platforms.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
JavaFX 1.2 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Mobile JavaFX
JavaFX Composer
JavaFX Products and Frameworks
Best Practices for Development
Best Practices for Deployment

Skinning applications with multiple CSS files


The benefit of externalizing CSS is the ability to update the look and feel of your application without having to update the code or recompile. Another attractive aspect of externalizing CSS is to let your users select a preferred theme or applying a skin. In this recipe, we are going to extend the data input form example, used throughout this chapter, to add skinning capabilities with CSS.

Getting ready

The concepts presented here all deal with CSS and externalizing through CSS files. If you have not used CSS, or are unfamiliar with JavaFX's support for CSS, it is recommended that you review the recipe Styling your applications with CSS and Using CSS files to apply styles from this chapter to get acquainted with JavaFX 's implementation of CSS.

This recipe is going to reuse the data form example used throughout the chapter. Refer to the recipe Creating a form with JavaFX controls for a thorough background on this example. In this usage, we...