Learning Curve Journal, Part 2: Declarative User Interfaces

Having used the Java programming language to define user interfaces for nearly a decade, the author's first experiences with JavaFX Script quickly highlighted a major difference between the two environments. Although programmers use procedural code to define the User Interface (UI) in the Java language, in JavaFX Script, one can use declarative statements to define the UI. That's a significant difference, and adapting to it can take some time and effort. To learn this new declarative style for creating UIs, the author decided to port an existing application UI from its Java language implementation to JavaFX Script. The author picked an image viewer application that he had created for a Swingworker article on the Java language hub of the Sun Developer Network.