JavaFX Third Party Tools and Utilities



The third party developer community has shown a strong interest in JavaFX, and a number of third party solutions are currently available or in development. These range from UI controls, to development frameworks and DSL extensions. Here are a few projects:


GroovyFX

GroovyFX is an API that makes working with JavaFX in Groovy much simpler and more natural. GroovyFX is focused on exploiting the power of the Groovy Builder pattern to make JavaFX development easier and more concise than what is possible in Java. GroovyFX also leverages Groovy's powerful DSL features and AST transformations to eliminate boilerplate, making GroovyFX code easier to write and, just as importantly, easier to read.
 
 

ScalaFX

ScalaFX is a DSL for the Scala JVM language that lets you declaratively build UIs. ScalaFX has a programmer-friendly object-literal syntax, natural language bind expressions, and a tailored animation syntax, while retaining the type-safety of Java. Even if you are not a Scala programmer, it will help you write cleaner and easier to maintain JavaFX code, and can work with your existing projects since it has full Java interoperability.

JFXtras

JFXtras is a collection of high quality controls and extensions that are helpful in developing real-world JavaFX applications. Application developers can reduce the amount of time they spend reinventing commonly needed components by leveraging the JFXtras library in their projects.
 

FXForm2

FXForm2 is a library providing automatic JavaFX 2.0 form generation. Just write your model bean and let FXForm2 generate the user interface. Main features include automatic form generation and bi-directional binding to the bean properties, CSS styling, bean validation (JSR 303), form customization including fields reordering and filtering, tooltips, localization, custom editors, and more.
 

DataFX

DataFX is a collection of data sources and cell factories to vastly simplify the process of getting data from various locations into JavaFX UI controls (most notably ListView and TableView), and once it is in these controls, making it look good and be more functional. DataFX enables the rapid integration of data sources (JDBC, RST, XML, CSV, etc.), and improved cell support in controls - particularly around editing the data that is visible to the user.
 
 

JFX Flow

JFX Flow is a free, open source framework for developing rich, interactive and user friendly Web-style GUIs for desktops using JavaFX. JFX Flow combines the powerful feature set of Java FX (styling, animations, FXML, etc.) with a simple ‘Web flow’ style framework, that is easy to use and that fosters clean architectural patterns, especially when developing Java EE applications.

e(fx)clipse

e(fx)clipse includes a set of plugins for your Eclipse IDE to make authoring JavaFX applications a smooth experience, as well as a set of runtime plugins to make JavaFX useable in an OSGi environment. For medium and big applications it provides plugins for the Eclipse 4 Application platform, providing a first class application framework to JavaFX developers.
 

FX Experience Tools

FX Experience Tools is a set of theming tools for JavaFX. The Caspian Styler lets you customize the look of the default skin for JavaFX (Caspian), and generates a CSS file you can use to style all controls in your JavaFX application. The Animation Spline Editor lets you simulate what an animation looks like if applied to a scale, rotate, fade or translate animation. The Derived Color Calculator lets you calculate derived colors that are used extensively throughout the default Caspian skin.

Scenic View

Scenic View is a JavaFX application designed to make it simple to understand the current state of your application scenegraph, and to also easily manipulate properties of the scenegraph without having to keep editing your code. This lets you find bugs, and get things pixel perfect without having to do the compile-check-compile dance.