[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 2 ■ Setting Up Your Java 8 IDE: An Introduction to NetBeans 8.0
In case you are wondering, the start page displays every time you start the NetBeans IDE, and if you wanted to
open the Start Page tab later on, perhaps to explore the Media Library section (demos) and tutorials, you can! To
open the start page at any time, you use the NetBeans IDE 8.0 Help menu and the Start Page submenu. For future
reference, I usually notate a menu sequence like this: Help ➤ Start Menu.
The first thing that you will want to do in NetBeans IDE 8.0 is create a new InvinciBagel game project! To
accomplish this, you will use the NetBeans 8.0 New Project series of dialogs. This is one of those helpful Java
programming features that I mentioned earlier (see the section “NetBeans IDE 8.0 Is Smart: Put Your Editing into
Hyperdrive”) that creates a bootstrap project with the correct JavaFX libraries, .main() and .start() methods, and
import statements (for more details, see Chapter 3).
Click the File menu, at the top-left corner of the DE, as displayed in Figure 2-4 (left), and then select New Project
(the first menu item). Note that to the right of this selection, there is a keyboard shortcut given (Ctrl+Shift+N), in case
you want to memorize it.
If you want to use this keyboard short-cut to bring up the New Project series of dialogs, hold down the CTRL and
Shift keys on your keyboard (both at the same time), and while they are depressed (held down), press the N key. This
will do the same thing as using the File ➤ New Project menu sequence.
The first in the series is the Choose Project dialog, shown in Figure 2-4 (right). Because you are going to use the
powerful JavaFX new media engine in your game, select JavaFX from the list of programming language categories in
the Categories pane, and because a game is a type of application, select JavaFX Application from the Projects pane.
Remember that Oracle made JavaFX a part of Java 7 and Java 8, so a JavaFX game is also a Java game, whereas
before Java 7 (in Java 6), JavaFX was its own separate programming language! The JavaFX engine had to be recoded as
a Java (7 and 8) API (set of libraries) for it to become a seamless part of the Java programming language. The JavaFX
API replaces AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit) and Swing, and although these older UI design libraries can still be
used in Java projects, they are normally used only by legacy (older) Java code so that those projects can compile and
run in Java 7 and 8. You will be compiling and running the new project you are creating here a bit later in this chapter.
Note that there is a Description pane below the other panes that will tell you what your selections will give you.
In this case, that would be a new Java application with enabled JavaFX features; here, “enabled” indicates that the
JavaFX API libraries will be included (and started) in the Java application project’s class and methods, as you will soon
see in the code (for further information on what the code means, see Chapter 3).
Click the Next button to advance to the next dialog in the series, which is the Finding Feature dialog, shown in
Figure 2-5. This dialog displays a progress bar while it is “Activating JavaFX 2,” which equates to installing the JavaFX
API libraries in your project code infrastructure. You will find that sometimes JavaFX 8 is still referred to as JavaFX 2
(2.3 was the latest version of JavaFX before people started using the name JavaFX 8, probably to sync up with Java 8).
I have also seen discussion of a JavaFX 3, which is now being called JavaFX 8, and because JavaFX is now a part of Java 8,
I am going to refer to it simply as JavaFX for the duration of this book.
Figure 2-5. Step 2: Finding Feature dialog, showing the progress bar for the process of activating JavaFX
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