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

Styling your applications with CSS


In previous recipes, we have seen how to control the look and feel of JavaFX graphical nodes programmatically by setting property values on the node directly. Programmatic style manipulation works just fine, but is hard to externalize. If you want to update the look of your application, you must recompile. However, JavaFX also offers a way to declare styles using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This recipe shows you how to apply styles declaratively to JavaFX graphical nodes using CSS.

Getting ready

Before going through this recipe, you should have an idea of what CSS is and how it is used for designing HTML web pages. Similar concepts are discussed here and other CSS-related recipes in this chapter. CSS was created by the web governing body W3C and is traditionally used for markup development languages such as HTML and other XML-derivatives (XUL, SVG, and so on). For information about CSS, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets.

To illustrate...