Simon Morris's Blog

Simon Morris started coding professionally back when 1 MB of RAM was considered decadent. He eked a living writing games for a while, before winding up scribbling R+D code at a top UK university. In early 1996 he discovered Java, drawn immediately to its latent potential - which, he reckons, it still hasn't even begun to tap. He now owns a laptop with more than 1 Mb of RAM (but doesn't like to boast about it).

Thinking Declaratively in JavaFX

JavaOne is coming up, and with it no doubt a slew of enhancements to JavaFX. Many of you reading will have no doubt dipped your toe into the waters of Sun's new platform, but how well do you really understand the power of its Domain-specific language, JavaFX Script?

I've had a pretty good excuse to write lots of JavaFX code of late, and to be exposed to some of the difficulties programmers first have when approaching the language. One of the common stumbling blocks seems to involve the shift in thinking from purely procedural source code (where the function/method is our chief currency) to the declarative source code supported by JavaFX Script (where code may be nested into a tree structure).

So, what I'm going to do in this post is take a problem ripe for declarative exploitation, and show how JavaFX Script might change the way we tackle the solution. For newbies struggling to understand the power of JavaFX, hopefully this will be an eye opener. For the uninitiated, perhaps it might demonstrate how JavaFX Script differs from Java and other languages.

The example I've chosen is the parsing of an XML file — a simple enough task one might think, but a task which highlights the stark contrasts between the structure of the document being processed, and the structure of the source code processing it. (Hopefully that last sentence will make a bit more sense by the time you've finished reading this posting!)

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May 2009

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Thinking Declaratively in JavaFX

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Kickstarting Google Web Toolkit on the Client Side
The focus of most Ajax development is the interaction between a slightly richer client and the server, with not a lot of attention paid to how much can be done on the client side. In this article, S. E. Morris takes the Google Web Toolkit and focuses exclusively on the client side, showing how to perform sophisticated layout and animation and providing compelling demos that never make a server call. Jun. 27, 2006

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