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Relation between fxgraph and fxml
I just saw some people coming to my blog from an article published on The Register where the author referenced e(fx)clipse. The author there talks about FXGraph and that it limits the appeal of e(fx)clipse which is think is not correct because nobody is forced to use the DSL I've been working on (use what ever you want - Java, GrooveFX, ScalaFX, ...). It's true that I currently don't provide good tooling support for FXML but I plan to work on an FXML tooling so that people who want to directly edit them get decent support for it. I think an important fact when it comes to FXGraph is that the DSL is not translated into Java or JavaByte code but into FXML so you can think of FXGraph-Files as a nicer textual representation of the FXML files content. The advantage of spitting out FXML are in my opinion:
- No lock in - you are not forced to work with FXGraph for ever because the generated FXML-File should be supported by e.g. Netbeans, IDEA, ... you can switch to another IDE and continue with the work there
- Tool exchange - My opinion is that FXML is designed as an interchange format between different tools and not really designed to be authored directly so all upcoming tools (e.g. Scene Builder) will use it as interchange format
- No runtime layer - FXGraph-Files get translated automatically in FXML while coding and so you don't need an extra library to make things work
Here's a small diagram how I think FXML is designed to be used:
What's missing at the moment is an FXML to FXGraph translator but this is something not really hard to implement so it's already on my TODO-List for 0.0.10.