Java Magazine - January/February 2012

//rich client /

To make the price flash, we create a Timeline, which varies the opacity of the cell from 1.0 to 0.1 and back again over a period of one second. The cell is made to flash three times by setting the cycleCount appropriately.

Skinning

Another exciting feature of the JavaFX platform is support for cascading style sheets (CSS). Many nodes implement support for CSS, including TableCell.

Adding a style sheet to an application is pretty simple. If you refer back to the QuoteFXTable class in Listing 2, you will see that after we create the scene in our Runnable task, we add a reference to a CSS file to the style sheet list of the scene. This references a CSS file that we include in the same package as the QuoteFXTable class.

Now look at the QuoteFXTableNode class again in Listing 3, specifically the call method of the Callback class that we pass to the setCellFactory method of the price column. Here, we create a new QuoteFXPriceCell object and add to the style class list a reference to the name we use in our CSS file to set parameters.

The CSS file is shown below:
This is very simple. We create a style
that has the name we used in the Java
code and specify a pseudo-class that
means this style will be used only on
price cells that are filled. Two param-
eters are specified: one to set the color
the cell is filled with and one to set the
color of the border.

YOUR
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JAVA IN ACTION

You can migrate a
Swing application to
use the richness of JavaFX
without having to engage
in a complete rewrite.
Conclusion

In this article, we’ve seen
how we can migrate a
Swing application to use the richness
of JavaFX without having to engage in
a complete rewrite. We’ve modified a
sample Swing application to replace its
table component in order to make use
of the exciting functionality of JavaFX to
improve the application’s look and feel.