SceneBuilder
Finally, having gone through most of the features of FXML, we will look into a great tool to handle them—SceneBuilder. It's an open source tool, primarily developed by Oracle. It can be downloaded from the Oracle site or built from sources—see the instructions at https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/OpenJFX/Building+OpenJFX.
Working with a WYSIWYG editor
The What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) conception is extremely useful for building UIs. You can design your application by dragging and dropping components and adjusting their properties:
This is a base SceneBuilder UI. It contains the following components:
- Drawing board in the middle
- List of available components in the top-left corner
- List of properties for the currently selected component in the right-hand side panel
- Scenegraph representation, called Hierarchy (it works in a similar way to the ScenicView tool we used in previous chapters), in the bottom-left corner
The main functionality is pretty straightforward, so I'll review...
