After having used Swing for the past 3 years for School and such, I decided to give JavaFX a try and play around with it. With the new Scene Builder and NetBeans 7.2, it’s been a blast so far.
The next step I’d like to do is convert a small project of mine into JavaFX. One of the issue however is that project uses a MVC Architecture. Basically I have a JFrame with a Toolbar, a JMenuBar, plus an empty JPanel.
The JPanel is used to display a View which is a JPanel built the using GUI Builder of NetBeans. This allows me to navigate to different view and each view is an independent component.
My question is as followed: Is there any ways to display a Scene inside a Scene? Or achieve similar result as a JPanel inside a JPanel, or a User Control inside a User Control (for the .Net folks)
Basically, I’d like to display another scene in the Gray area of the picture.
I had the same reaction when I came in: you want a Node (which feels wrong on a first glance). The Node is basically the root component that can contain itself (much like a JPanel) and though you can change out scenes on your stage if you’re looking for the “root component” it will extend Node for the MVC basics.
http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/api/javafx/scene/Node.html
I’m sure you could get fancy and swap out scenes on your stage (which is totally viable) but from my Swing background the Node behaved more naturally. Caviat: I find I write a bit more framework and abstractions to make it work for me (wrapped classes with Groups etc…) but it definitely does the trick.
I hope to find a better way, for my “Module” based project I initially used Scenes, but found it completely restricting. The Nodes allow for much more dynamic content.
Best of luck.
edit: reading the doc after answering I really should say “Parent” but the direct subclasses of Node are all useful as containers)