Java had the support for developing GUI applications since its version 1.0 using the AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit). Later, AWT was replaced by Swing, which gave a little better user experience, but still lacked the modern-looking widgets and the support for a developer’s productivity. Both AWT and Swing lacked the first-class support for data binding, efficient GUI rendering engines, easy-to-use 2D and 3D libraries for developers, and style sheet support. JavaFX was first released in 2008 as the tool to use for developing rich Internet applications (RIAs); it used a statically typed declarative language called JavaFX Script, which did not attract a lot of attention from Java developers. JavaFX 2.0, released in 2011, caught the Java community’s attention when it dropped the support for JavaFX Script and supported writing JavaFX programs using the Java programming language. In its current version, JavaFX 17 is supported as an open source add-on that can be downloaded from the Gluon company’s website. Now JavaFX 17 is considered a real successor for Swing for building the GUI application using the Java platform.

Learn JavaFX 17 shows you how to start developing rich client desktop applications in JavaFX 17 using your Java skills. It provides comprehensive coverage of the JavaFX 17 features. Each chapter starts with an introduction to the topic at hand. A step-by-step discussion of the topic with small snippets of code follows. At the end of the topic’s discussion, a complete program is presented. Special care has been taken to present the topics in such a way that chapters can be read serially. The book contains numerous pictures to aid you in visualizing the GUI that is built at every step in the discussion.

The book starts with an introduction to JavaFX and its history. It lists the system requirements and the steps to start developing JavaFX applications. It shows you how to create a Hello World application in JavaFX, explaining every line of code in the process. Later in the book, advanced topics such as 2D and 3D graphics, charts, FXML, advanced controls, and printing are discussed.

I faced a few hurdles while writing the first edition of this book. As JavaFX 8 was being developed, JavaFX 2, the version before JavaFX 8, was the first release of JavaFX that used the Java programming language to write JavaFX code. There were a few bugs in JavaFX 2. Sometimes, it took me a couple of days of hard work to create an example to work with, only to realize that there was a bug in it. Later, if something did not work, I would look at the JIRA bug reports for JavaFX before spending too much time researching it myself. I had to fix bugs as I found them. It took me 18 months to finish this book, and, in the end, it was satisfying to see that what I had produced was a lot of useful material covering almost every topic in JavaFX so fully that readers could use it to learn and build a rich client application quickly using JavaFX. I hope you will enjoy the book and benefit greatly from it.

I believe that programming is simple if you learn it that way. Keeping this in mind, I kept the examples in the book as simple as possible, presenting them in as few lines as I could. The examples focus on the topic being discussed. I do not present complex GUI in my examples, keeping in mind that this could obscure the learning process of the topic at hand. I have seen books that contain examples that run four or five pages long, sometimes even longer; readers of such books (myself included) often get lost in trying to understand the logic of the program, thus forgetting what they were trying to learn in that section. Therefore, simple programs in this book are intended to help you learn JavaFX faster. The book includes many ready-to-run programs and even more pictures. Having more pictures than programs is evident from my approach in keeping the readers’ interest the first priority. Almost every time I discuss a snippet of code producing a UI, I include the picture of the results of the UI, so readers are not left to their imaginations as to what the code snippet will produce. Having to run every snippet of code to see the output can hinder the learning rhythm.