Major components of FxObjects in JavaFX

By: Srikanth Shenoy in Java Tutorials on 2010-07-31

Developing enterprise applications today using JavaFX is a challenge. The industry has not matured enough to identify patterns and practices. Consequently practioners (architects and developers alike) commit the same mistakes again and again. There is a complete lack of non-UI frameworks that make JavaFX application development easy and fast. FxObjects attempts to address that gap. The 0.1 version released provides powerful features.
What is FxObjects
In a single short line - "FxObjects makes Enterprise JavaFX development easy, elegant and fast"
Framework is built from the grounds-up with Test Driven Development in mind. Mock Commands are provided. Easily integrates with JUnit and jMock. User guide covers this in detail.
Major components of FxObjects
Command Framework
Command framework is a FxObjects subproject that provides lightweight and small footprint (50K) library for:
1. Automated Xml to JavaFX round-tripping with zero code. JavaFX objects with any arbitrary depths, sequences are supported)
2. Xml to Java round trippng with JAXB is simplified.
3. Commands with support for executing services asynchronously off the Event Dispatch Thread (EDT) and receiving callback to run on the EDT take the pain and confusion out of the tricky async tasks
4. Commands for Http GET, POST and PUT are provided that make Http Requests methodical command oriented, dynamic and with a well planned lifecycle. HttpCommands work hand-in-hand with request and response builders for xml content to object conversion and vice versa. Thus developer can focus only on Java and JavaFX objects that are asynchronously delivered to callback methods which automatically run on the EDT.
Model View Presenter (MVP)
FxObjects brings MVP style development to JavaFX for the very first time. MVP is a Test Driven Development (TDD) friendly pattern. MVP makes the UI lean, mean and clean.
Controller Chain
With a in-built controller chain, JavaFX UI nodes can be organized into modules and tied together into the main application seamlessly making application evolution painless and navigation between pages and modules logical.
Dependency Injection on the client side
FxObjects need not be used with dependency injection, but it is very beneficial for large projects.
Combining Dependency injection with FxObjects presents a very powerful programming model for large JavaFX projects.
Spring is supported today. Guice support will be added in 0.2. Most samples use FxObjects with Spring