I think for class instantiation visualization there is VisualVM.

@carlw I remember now. The ControllerFactory is only consulted if the

fx:controller

attribute is set in the FXML. If it is not, I need to call

setController(this@UIComponent)

before the FXML is loaded (requirement of JavaFX). If the

fx:controller

attribute is set, I need to install a custom ControllerFactory and return the current component as the controller. This is of course too simplistic to support nested controllers.

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@hastebrot i use jvisualvm a lot...it does have a timeline, but that shows the growing heap. i use it to take snapshots, searching for a class that might be memory leak

The custom ControllerFactory could make sure the current UI component is returned for the root node, and then it could

find

other

fx:controller

attributes of sub views, or just instantiate them like the default FXMLLoader does if the controller class isn't a TornadoFX UIComponent.

@carlw My question is if we could leverage a custom FXMLLoader to do some more fancy stuff or support FXML even better?

(brb)

@ron I will fix tonight 🙂

@edvin I think you have to watch for Scene Builder compatibility. FXML can be extended to use custom properties, constants, repeating groups, and scripting but until those are exposed by SceneBuilder, they would be overwritten.

@edvin could the custom ControllerFactory return the results of a Type Safe Builder? Instead of returning Panel() it would return panel() or panel().view.root?

The Redux.js documentation (http://redux.js.org/) also uses GitBook. But the documentation allows links for/to each subsections, e.g. a link to the section "Action Creators" is http://redux.js.org/docs/basics/Actions.html#action-creators.

@carlw OK, I'll see what's needed to support every aspect of FXML. Why would you want to return a type safe builder from the controller factory? I don't follow.

I wonder how much effort we should put in fxml I think the power of tornadofx are the builders and the DSL

Wife is happily shopping

@edvin Sorry...Type Safe Builder for the FXMLLoader BuilderFactory method so that a call for a Panel.class returns panel().root instead of Panel(). ControllerFactory returns controllers packed with TornadoFX dependencies from injections.

@edvin Here's the reference for FXML. There are a lot elements that I find aren't widely used because of Scene Builder. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/javafx/api/javafx/fxml/doc-files/introduction_to_fxml.html

I'll try to catch up on everything tomorrow, today I need to sleep 🙂

I tried to use different UI abstraction patterns (MVC, MVP, MVVM, described in http://aalmiray.github.io/griffon-patterns/) with TornadoFX. But it is somehow strange to have the model in the controller. Will continue to work on this tomorrow.

In MVC (or at least in a favor of it) the

View

reads the

Model

, e.g. read changes from

personModel.firstNameProperty()

and write to

personView.firstNameLabel.textProperty()

.

And in the Griffon example code, the callback is defined in

SampleModel#mvcGroupInit

. I guess we would declare the binding of those properties in the

View

in TornadoFX.

To me, out-of-the-box JavaFX is more like this Forms and Controls architecture rather than MVC. When I worked with MVC and Struts, Spring, CakePHP, and JSF, there was the concept of centralized controllers that pulled from the model and forward to a view or received submissions form a view and pushed to the model. I don't see that type of controller with JavaFX. The Controller is completely tied to the View, so it's like you say: Model added to View. https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/uiArchs.html#FormsAndControls

Hmm.

I'd keep the binding to at most one level: UI controls to another object. Otherwise, you might get into a cascading updates problem where everything is firing and updating all the time. That's what I'm doing with MVVM. The View (including the JavaFX Controller) binds its controls (ex TextFields) with a special ViewModel bean of JavaFX properties.

You use the

ViewModel

or

ItemViewModel

class from TornadoFX for your ViewModel?

I'm not fully up-to-speed with TornadoFX, but I've been using ViewModel.

My comments are also on straight-up JavaFX programs that I work on.

There is a chapter about

ViewModel

and

ItemViewModel

in https://edvin.gitbooks.io/tornadofx-guide/content/11.%20ViewModel%20and%20Validation.html. See section "Introducing ViewModel" and "ItemViewModel".

this is some code based on what i'm trying to describe. it can apply to TornadoFX too

@carlw Thanks for all the advice and good links! My bed is calling now.