Hi, Although I don't agree with everything said here at the start of this thread, I agree with the base idea that JavaFX would benefit from being more open than it is currently. It's something I've already said here in this mailing list and since it's been a while and that discussion probably already got forgotten I'll add the comments to this thread again.
Not even just the controls case but more hooks to extend JavaFX just generally by adding API that allows for that and making things less private/final/etc. It would be great to be able to extend more parts of JavaFX in a library independent way (i.e. by creating your own library that extends some parts of JavaFX in more fundamental cool way). Besides what was already said about controls, here's another example: wouldn't it be great for the community to be able to create a library that could extend the CSS parser by adding animations, layout support, etc, etc. One could argue, why don't you just contribute a PR to the JavaFX code base that does just that (adds animation support to CSS, or something less trivial like that)? I'd say that that process is too lengthy and often out of possibility for an individual developer that wants to improve JavaFX but doesn't have time to do it that way. I see the advantage of exposing less of the internals and why the JavaFX team decided to do it. Many of the same guys that developed JavaFX were part of the Swing team which were bothered by the inverse situation, i.e. being too open (which also can have its disadvantages). Weighing in the pros and cons, I still think there's a bigger advantage in being more open than closed. This hinders the capacity for the community to create libraries that extend JavaFX in new and fundamental ways without having to fork JavaFX. And this is more of a reality now that the JavaFX team is smaller (than the original team) and hence has less capacity to keep improving and adding features to JavaFX which means it has to rely more on the community. I also agree with the process of submitting a bug and following upon it, commenting, etc. Ideally it should be easier. That's something that has also been brought up before. Anyways, this mail is not meant to put down the guys working on JavaFX, there are no perfect toolkits, each one has its downfalls. Think it more like throwing in ideas and sharing my experience of using JavaFX for creating libraries and applications. -- Pedro Duque Vieira - https://www.pixelduke.com
