[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 4 ■ An Introduction to JavaFX 8: Exploring the Capabilities of the Java 8 Multimedia Engine
The javafx.scene.text subpackage has classes for rendering text shapes and fonts into your scenes. This includes
the Font class, for employing any fonts that you may want to use that are not a JavaFX system font, as well as the
Text class, for creating a text node that will display the text values using this font. There is also a specialized layout
container class, called TextFlow, which is used to flow text, much like you would see done on a word processor.
The javafx.scene.transform subpackage offers classes for rendering 2D and 3D spatial transformations, such
as the Scale, Rotate, Shear, Translate, and Affine (3D rotation) subclasses of the Transform superclass. These can
be applied to any Node object in the Scene Graph. This allows anything in your scene graph (text, UI controls, shapes,
meshes, images, media, and so on) to be transformed in any way that you like, which affords JavaFX game developers
a ton of creative power. In case you are wondering, translation is linear movement of an entire object; shear is linear
movement on a 2D plane in two different directions or movement in one direction when another part of the 2D
plane is fixed. Imagine moving the top of a plane, while the bottom remains fixed, such that the square becomes a
parallelogram, or moving the top and bottom of the same plane (a square) in different directions.
The javafx.scene.web subpackage furnishes classes for rendering web assets into a scene, using a collection of
classes, including WebView, WebEvent, WebEngine, WebHistory, and HTMLEditor. The WebEngine (see, other
people call things engines as well) class, as you might imagine, does the processing for showing HTML5 + CSS3 +
JS in JavaFX, and the WebView class creates the node for displaying the WebEngine output in the Scene Graph.
The WebHistory class (object, ultimately) holds the session history (from WebEngine instantiation to removal from
memory) for the web pages visited, and WebEvent bridges the JavaScript web event processing with the JavaFX
event processing.
Now that you have looked at a plethora of important and useful classes (objects) in the javafx.scene package and
its related subpackages, let’s take a look at the 15 top-level JavaFX packages to get a better idea of the key capabilities
that JavaFX offers for application development (focusing of course, on those that can be used for game development).
Other JavaFX Packages: The 15 Top-Level Packages
There are 15 top-level packages (javafx.packagename being what I consider a top-level package), some of which
have subpackage levels as well, as you have seen with the javafx.scene package and subpackages. Table 4-2 gives an
overview of these packages and describes their contents.
Table 4-2. JavaFX Top-Level Packages, Their Primary Functions, and a Description of Their Functional Classes
Package Name Functions Description of Contents
javafx.animation Animation Timeline, Transition, AnimationTimer, Interpolator, KeyFrame, KeyValue
javafx.application Application Application (init, start, stop methods), Preloader, Parameters, Platform
javafx.beans JavaFX beans Java interfaces that define the most generic form of observability
javafx.collections Collections Java collections that define the most generic form of observability
javafx.concurrent Threading Threading classes: Task, Service, ScheduledService, WorkerStateEvent
javafx.css CSS Classes related to implementing CSS in JavaFX
javafx.embed Embeds Embeds deprecated Java Swing and Java AWT GUI paradigms
javafx.event Event handler Event handling classes: Event, ActionEvent, EventType, WeakEventHandler
javafx.fxml FXML FXML
javafx.geometry 3D geometry 3D geometry classes
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