@kastork to my understanding, yyes. But you can configure Controllers for scopes too, which I havent used but definitely sound helpful

@kastork check out https://github.com/netopyr/reduxfx

@gtnarg Say "reduxfx" three times fast

@gtnarg Thanks for that pointer... very much worth further investigation

I imagine by the time I wake up tomorrow @edvin will have re-implemented the whole thing in Kotlin and incorporated it into TFX

@kastork - I agree that controllers are generally stateless - state lives in the ViewModel

(just reading your question above)

@gtnarg I haven't made many desktop apps (GUI development on desktop is quite boring to me). But in server-side apps, such as in Grails, controllers are certainly stateless in my experience.

So far, I like my singleton objects as state storage. But I'm open to a better way.

Singleton's don't work so well in cases where you may have many instances of the same view each with their own state. In javafx, your state is maintained in Properties which update the view reactively through binding. The ViewModel makes managing this quite easy. Scopes help to separate out or share state between views (depending on your requirements)

I haven't really gotten into scopes yet. @edvin has suggested that in TFX they may be problematic so I've just not gone there. What I'm doing now is creating an

object

that contains an observable list of domain objects. And then in places where I need its contents I get that list and put it in a val. So any number of views can pull in that list.

I think you may have misunderstood @edvin - scopes are really powerful and solid afaik

If you post some simple examples - we could show you some alternatives. The nice thing about TFX is that it doesn't force anything on you but it's helpful to see some of the best practices that are emerging...

@kastork I may become less popular for saying this but if singletons work for your particular application and you dont foresee needing more than that, go for it. But if you are creating a large UI with a lot of isolated contexts and scopes, then you probably should leverage more disciplined patterns.

LOL - becoming less popular by expressing my opinions is my stock in trade

Truthfully, though, I believe in the value of best practices, and will be happy to learn and apply them

I agree with @thomasnield - it's overkill to apply a pattern when it's not buying you anything.

We need an "Effective JavaFX" book

Or "Effective TornadoFX"

crap, now @edvin will write a book before I wake up

okay guys I'm done for the day... time to play Civ VI

likewise - good night

Haha, guys 🙂 I think @gtnarg's suggestion to use a ViewModel when you need to store state is a good idea. It is technically very much the same as a Controller, but it's semantics suggests that it is a good place to put mutable state, and especially observable properties that are shared between multiple views. For the record: Scopes are not problematic at all, they provide clean solutions to many difficult problems. I might need to create a few screencasts to really showcase how powerful they are, and how they help clean up your code.

I also agree with @thomasnield about not over engineering anything. Kotlin is pragmatic, so is TornadoFX - and so should we be. Almost everything in a typical TFX application is type safe and refactorable, so don't sweat it. Do what works, but be open to refactoring as your application grows. For small problem domains, I would even put business logic directly in a View, then move it to a Controller when the app or code grows.

I created the screencast, but there is something wrong with the codec, almost like it's missing key frames. Trying to upload it, but at least locally it has lots of glitches 😞

Huh.. When I uploaded it to YouTube, the artifacts were gone 🙂 The data conversion actually fixed the issues I saw locally.

If any of you have the time to watch it and tell me if there are any video glitches, I'd be very happy 🙂

It isn't done processing yet though, only low res yet.

Wow, the colored output of Maven 3.5 is really nice.