Hendrik Ebbers - Mastering JavaFX 8 Controls

Mastering JavaFX 8 Controls

Hendrik Ebbers

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For SilkeBecause you helped me every day writing this book. I wrote this book in my free time, so there were weeks where I completely disappeared from normal home life. You managed everything alone, and in addition you backed me when I became frustrated about this project. Without you, I couldnt have managed this.

For the JavaFX communityBecause without the awesome community, I would have never been in the position to write this book.

For my fatherBecause you taught me that you can create everything you imagine if you have enough courage to take hold of it.

For all of my friends and familyBecause you heard me talking about this book too many times but still listened to me.

About the Author

Hendrik Ebbers is senior Java architect at Materna GmbH in Dortmund, Germany. His main focus besides research and development is primarily in the areas of JavaFX, middleware, and DevOps. Additionally, Hendrik is founder and leader of the Java User Group Dortmund and gives talks and presentations in user groups and international conferences. He blogs about UI-related topics at www.guigarage.com (or on Twitter @hendrikEbbers) and contributes to some open source projects such as DataFX, BoxFX, AquaFX, and Vagrant-Binding.

About the Technical Editor

Simon Ritter works as a Java technology evangelist for Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems before that. He has been developing Java code since JDK 1.0 and has been involved in JavaFX since its launch as a scripting language.

JavaFX from a Developers Point of View

My background is in a lot of Swing development and web application creation. For web applications, I mostly used plain HTML or JSF to create the views, and I did some little applications with most of the other technologies (Adobe Flex, Flash, Android, Wicket, GWT, and so on) to learn more about these UI toolkits over the years.

For me, JavaFX is a perfect combination of most of the best practices that have come out of these technologies. For a Swing developer, most of the basic JavaFX APIs are easy to learn because the main concepts seem to be similar when looking at the framework. Under the hood, most of the technologies are different, but you can structure an application in a better way by using FXML and CSS, for example. Compared to HTML applications, JavaFX development is much easier for me because theoretically, you can do whatever you want and dont need to think about cross-browser behavior and all that stuff. You can create the complete view by using What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors like Scene Builder and use your favorite Java IDE for development.