JavaFX

Another short tip: Swing provides a layout manager called CardLayout, which manages a set of components (cards) inside a container but always only shows one of them. The method CardLayout.show(Container, String) allows to switch between the components / the cards. The same behaviour can be accomplished in JavaFX by using the StackPane, adding several children (each using the entire width and height of the pane) and calling the Node.toFront() method to switch between the children. However, there is one big difference: the StackPane will always layout all of its children, independent of wether they are currently showing or not. This [...]

This is the easiest and shortest tip so far. If you want to do any of the following things: learn how to use CSS make your custom controls look like the standard controls reuse an SVG path graphic used by a standard control (e.g. scrollbar arrows) figure out how to navigate the structure of the standard controls determine the color used for a specific item consistently modify several standard controls then simply take a look at the default CSS stylesheet that ships with JavaFX. The file is called modena.css and can be found in the jfxrt.jar file in this location: com/sun/javafx/scene/control/skin/modena/

Custom controls often feature "read-only" properties. This means that they can not be set from outside the control, not even from their own skin class. It is often the behaviour of a control that leads to a change of the read-only property. In JavaFX this behaviour can be implemented in the control itself and in the skin. So we sometimes end up with a skin wanting to update a read-only property of the control. How can this be done? Backdoor: Property Map The solution is quite simple: use the properties map of the control as a backdoor to the control class. [...]