There a little known, but very useful function call in most Properties. This can be overridden to turn a Property into a class that transforms a value change into an action.
Hi!
My name is Dave and I've been a professional programmer for all of my adult life, with my first real programming job back in 1985. Which means I've been doing this for a long time, or at least it seems that way to me.
Very early in my career, I noticed that lots of IT departments struggle to succeed at software development.
It's one of the most difficult things any company can try to do because software development is almost always about exploration, investigation, innovation and learning as you go. Users rarely know what they want, certainly don't know what is possible, and have trouble visualizing how software will work before it is delivered. Programmers, for their part, often have limited understanding of the business and are usually expected to leverage new technologies they've never used before to build working solutions.
For the past 35 years I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we think about building systems.
This website is a place for me to share what I've learned about not just programming, but the entire lifecyle of business applications - from the initial idea to satisfy a business need, right through development and maintenance, to the inevitable day when it's time to replace it with something newer and better.
Since about 2014, I've spent a large amount of my professional time developing desktop applications in JavaFX. There is a surprising lack on the web right now of high quality information about how to use JavaFX properly, and I'm hoping that my articles on this website about JavaFX will fill that hole.
My name is Dave and I've been a professional programmer for all of my adult life, with my first real programming job back in 1985. Which means I've been doing this for a long time, or at least it seems that way to me.
Very early in my career, I noticed that lots of IT departments struggle to succeed at software development.
It's one of the most difficult things any company can try to do because software development is almost always about exploration, investigation, innovation and learning as you go. Users rarely know what they want, certainly don't know what is possible, and have trouble visualizing how software will work before it is delivered. Programmers, for their part, often have limited understanding of the business and are usually expected to leverage new technologies they've never used before to build working solutions.
For the past 35 years I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we think about building systems.
This website is a place for me to share what I've learned about not just programming, but the entire lifecyle of business applications - from the initial idea to satisfy a business need, right through development and maintenance, to the inevitable day when it's time to replace it with something newer and better.
Since about 2014, I've spent a large amount of my professional time developing desktop applications in JavaFX. There is a surprising lack on the web right now of high quality information about how to use JavaFX properly, and I'm hoping that my articles on this website about JavaFX will fill that hole.
Recent posts
Taking a look at a JavaFX application that suffers from some very common beginner mistakes, converting it to Kotlin and sorting out the issues.
Here’s a sample application that uses a ListView to display and edit bytes in a data file, showing the values in hex, octal, binary, decimal and as characters.
Taking a look at how EventHandlers, Listeners, Subscriptions and Bindings are different, and how they should be used in a JavaFX application.
Another example of creating a custom class. This time to build a container with a border and a Label that sits on the border.
Looking at ListView as a scrolling region of customized layouts, not just a list of String.
Is there such a thing as a “Right” or “Wrong” when looking at different approaches to solving a programming problem? Can one approach be objectively better than another? Spoiler alert: yes, it can.
How to build a radial menu in JavaFX.
In JavaFX 19 and 21, new methods have been added to the Observables library that should change the way you write Bindings and Listeners
We’re going to look at coupling: What it is, why it’s bad, and the ways that it can creep into your code.