Chapter 2. JavaFX 8 Essentials and Creating a Custom UI

Getting to know the essentials of JavaFX will definitely help you to easily build complicated and complex UI solutions.

In this chapter, you will get a brief introduction about JavaFX 8 architecture, so you get an idea of how JavaFX architecture components and engines interconnect together with your JavaFX application efficiently and render its graphics smoothly.

You will learn how to render graphics on the JavaFX scene and, for that, we will create a basic application using a scene, some controls, and styling.

We will touch upon the fundamentals of Java SE 8 features (such as Lambda and functional interfaces) to help increase code readability, quality, and productivity.

Once we have our first structured JavaFX 8 application, wouldn't it be nice if you could change the UI of your application without altering its functionality? You will learn about theming by having a glance at the fundamentals of JavaFX CSS styling.

Finally, you will find out how to use Scene Builder to create and define UI screens graphically and save them as a JavaFX FXML-formatted file. And you will get hands-on experience of creating custom controls.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Understanding JavaFX architecture components
• Using JavaFX components to set up the UI
• Using Java SE 8, Lambda expressions, and other features
• Theming your application to target different platforms
• Customizing the application UI with CSS
• Using the Scene Builder tool to create the UI visually
• Building a custom UI with FXML