Java Magazine - March/April 2012

create a JFXPanel that wraps the JavaFX nodes and can be manipulated in a Swing GUI in the same way as any other Component object.

We construct a new, final instance of JFXPanel and then set up a task to run on the JavaFX thread to construct the toolbar node. It is very important that all manipulation of the JavaFX scene be handled in this way.

Within the run method, we create each element of the toolbar as a Button control. To match the original format, we use only a graphical icon (implemented with ActiveIcon) with no text. Adding tooltip text is a simple method call.

To respond to the user clicking a button, we add a new event handler to each button. Again, within the handler method it is important that all activities happen on the Swing event thread, so we add a Runnable object via the SwingUtilities invokeLater method. All the run method has to do is invoke the appropriate actionPerformed method that would be called from the Swing toolbar via registered listeners. Strictly speaking, we should pass valid ActionEvent objects to these methods, but none of the methods use the argument, so for brevity of code we pass null.

The toolbar itself is constructed by passing references to the buttons we’ve created, along with any required separators, to the constructor. The items in a toolbar are typically Button, ToggleButton, and Separator objects, but any Node can be used. So, it would be simple to replace a static separator with a more dynamic, custom version.

Replacing the Old Toolbar

The last piece is to replace the instance of the JToolbar with our new JavaFX version. Listing 5 shows the changes to the initMainGUI method.

In order for the preferences to work (and to avoid a null-pointer exception), we must also change the synchGui WithGeneralLookPrefs method, as shown in Listing 6.

public class ActiveIcon extends Parent { public static final int TYPE_NONE = 0; public static final int TYPE_FADE = 1; public static final int TYPE_SPIN = 2; public static final int TYPE_GROW = 3; public static final int TYPE_SLIDE = 4;

public ActiveIcon(String fileName, int type) { URL imageURL = getClass().getResource(fileName);

JAVA IN ACTION

Conclusion

In this series of articles, we’ve looked at how to integrate JavaFX scene graphs into a Swing application by wrapping the scene graph as a Component, which can easily be manipulated by a layout manager. We’ve also looked at how events can be handled using both the Swing event dispatch thread and the JavaFX application thread. The real benefit of having this kind of integration is that you can gradually migrate an existing Swing application to JavaFX without having to rewrite it all in one go. As the examples have shown, it is straightforward to replace tables, toolbars, and other standard components and have these new components add rich, visually appealing effects such as translucency and animations.

JavaFX is an incredibly rich and powerful way to develop exciting new user interfaces in Java. Get started! </article>

if (imageURL == null) {
System.out.println("NULL image URL");
return;
}
Image iconImage = new Image( imageURL.toString());
ImageView iconView = new ImageView(iconImage);
double width = iconImage.get Width();