Stages, Scenes, and Layout

During the last decade, user interfaces have evolved beyond the capabilities of the old Java technologies. Modern users want to work with visually appealing applications and are used to the rich user interfaces brought by Web 2.0 and smartphones.

To address that, JavaFX was envisioned and added to Java a few releases ago. It was created from scratch to avoid any backward compatibility issues, and with a great understanding of the needs of modern user interfaces.

In this book, we will review the most important JavaFX APIs and will look into resolving some of the most common problems that JavaFX developers face, based on my development experience and over 500 questions I've answered in the JavaFX section of stackoverflow.com.

In the first chapter, we will start with the backstage of a JavaFX application, including its windows and content area, and see which API is responsible for each of these main building blocks:

• Application: This handles the application workflow, initialization, and command-line parameters
• Stage: The JavaFX term for the window
• Scene: This is the place for the window's content
• SceneGraph: The content of the Scene

At the end of the chapter, we will create a clock demo that will demonstrate the concepts from this chapter.