alright so I have

and for some reason that shows a white box

BUT

that shows a blue box

I think you are not adding the View to the stack pane try this

class MainView : View("Hello TornadoFX Application") {
  override val root = stackpane {
    add(GraphView::class)
  }
}

oh that worked

that's very strange

The reason why your second example worked

is that all the builders in TornadoFX add there Node to there parent automatically

GraphView()

is just calling the constructor of your

GraphView

class. It's not part of the TornadoFX DSL

so the

group

builder is adding itself to the stackpane

ohhh. and if it doesn't have a parent in the place it's being called it doesn't do anything

well like @Ruckus pointed out your

GraphView

is only calling the constructor and the

add()

is actually adding it

We should definitely have more documentation in Layouts.kt

GraphView()

is just the constructor for your class, whereas

group()

is a function defined in TornadoFX. If you used the constructor

Group()

you'd have to add it yourself as well. The DSL functions defined in TornadoFX take care of creating the object, adding it to the parent, and appending a scoped function to continue the DSL awesomeness.

We definitely need more documentation in all the code 🙂

@edvin has been adding a fair amount in several places, but there is a lot of legacy to catch up on.

If you want to work on adding some, it would be GREATLY appreciated

I think I need to work on understanding it first. Thank you all for your help!

I have a small suggestion about documentation - even if you don't feel up for adding the actual docs, feel free to point out functions that would benefit from a few well placed comments. We are plenty of people who can add those docs now, and just adding a couple each week would help immensely. New features have slowed down significantly now both because we are pretty feature complete, but also because JavaOne is upcoming, and some of us have other stuff to attend to because of that 🙂 However, using a few minutes here and there to add needed comments is not a problem, at least not for me. I feel bad for not committing as much code as I used to, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that we actually have a pretty capable framework now, so catching up with docs might be more healthy than always adding new features 🙂

If you have docs ideas that don't quite fit, start blogging!

I also think it would help to create Issues on github so that when ever we find time we can check there and add a few lines 😉

Even if an article is just you internalizing someone else's work, you'll put your own variation on the topic that might help others

@carlw Very good point!

@nimakro Yeah, and it's good to keep GitHub alive, the project might even look a bit dormant there because we do so much based on discussions here.

@edvin I agree and since it's hard to find stuff here on slack due to the fact that there is only a limited history, it is easily forgotten that someone pointed out that something is missing in the guide or not as clear.

@nimakro Good point. We should add issues or PR's against the guide for valuable stuff we discuss or explain here.