ActionFX

ActionFX is a declarative, less-intrusive MVC framework based on annotations and dependency injection that aims at simplifying the development of JavaFX applications by reducing the amount of boilerplate code a developer has to provide. The focus in using "ActionFX" lies on providing the "action" and not on tedious coding of wiring together of components, callbacks and change listener. The result is less and cleaner code, which is easier to read, maintain and especially test.

For a quick introduction to ActionFX, you can refer to the sample applications. For a more detailed overview on the features of ActionFX, please refer to the core documentation.

This document contains the following chapters:

• Design Philosophies
• Feature Overview
• Module Overview

Design Philosophies

• Support and encourage the implementation of the MVC pattern: Controllers are light-weight, loosely-coupled components that are not dependent on any framework base classes. Views on the other hand are preferably defined via FXML and other concerns like view behavior, main-window/popup-window considerations are configuration aspects defined via annotations (and not as tons of code).
• Lightweight and Less-intrusive: ActionFX does not force you to build your classes on top of framework classes. At no point in time, you need to derive your classes from ActionFX classes. Classes supplied by the framework can be used e.g. to speed up the setup process, but this is not required. At all point in time, it is possible to make normal use of plain JavaFX development style.
• Use Dependency Injection to wire controllers: Make use of dependency injection to use a controller from another controller. ActionFX comes with an integrated dependency injection container where you can define whether your controller and associated views are singleton-scoped beans (default) or prototyped-scoped beans that are instantiated each time you need a particular controller / view (e.g. for dialogues requesting user information it might make sense to have them prototype-scoped). Although ActionFX has its own bean container, you are free to decide for a full Spring integration with ActionFX (see next design philosophy).
• Choose the container technique on your own: It is up to the developer to decide whether to use a Spring container or not. For smaller applications with just a few views it might be an overkill to integrate Spring. However, for larger applications Spring can be useful for dependency injection and its great integration technologies. Thus, Spring or Spring Boot can be easily used within ActionFX to manage controller and views as Spring beans. None of the features of ActionFX itself will force you to!
• Extensibility: ActionFX features are implemented as "controller extension", where each annotation and extension is encapsulated in its own controller extension class. Developers can register and extend ActionFX by their own controller extensions. Controller extensions are applied to the controller after instantiation, after dependency injection, but before methods annotated with @PostConstruct are invoked.

Feature Overview

ActionFX provides the following features in a declarative fashion without requiring you to write code:

• Dependency Injection with plain ActionFX directly or with a Spring container
• FXML support in order to define controllers (or use statically implemented views)
• View handling through annotations e.g. injecting nested views into a scene graph or navigate to a certain view
• Declarative form-binding of custom domain objects either with JavaFX properties or plain Java types
• Declarative, control-based validation mechanism that allows to apply validation rules on controls injected via @FMXL.
• Injection of control values e.g. selected items from a javafx.scene.control.TableView into methods by using annotations on method arguments
• Docking and Undocking support for parts of the JavaFX scenegraph and display a part of a view into an own javafx.stage.Stage
• Behaviour support for nodes: Enable or disable nodes like a javafx.scene.control.Button depending on whether the user supplied input in other controls like text fields or table views
• Publish/Subscribe mechanism in order to implement a loose coupling of controller using @AFXSubscribe annotation
• Easy configuration of table/tree table views by just using annotations, which avoids a lot of code lines compared to pure JavaFX
• Integration of user confirmation dialogues or simple text input dialogs in a declarative fashion
• Out-of-the-box internationalization support through resource bundle integration (for Spring a org.springframework.context.MessageSource can be leveraged)
• Many more features and handy annotations (see annotations in actionfx-core)

Module Overview

ActionFX is split up into several sub-modules that can be optionally included in your application:

Module	Description	API Documentation	Dependency
actionfx-core	The core routines around ActionFX. It contains the central class ActionFX for accessing controllers and views. As ActionFX uses an internal bean container with dependency injection support, it is recommended to wire all controllers with @Inject instead of accessing them through this class (please note that there is also support of Spring's bean container through ActionFX's actionfx-spring-boot module).	Javadoc	implementation group: "com.github.martinkoster", name: "actionfx-core", version: "1.6.0"
actionfx-testing	This module contains JUnit 5 classes for unit- and integration testing of JavaFX and ActionFX components. This is achieved by JUnit 5 extensions FxThreadForAllMonocleExtension and FxThreadForEachMonocleExtension to run tests inside the JavaFX thread.	Javadoc	implementation group: "com.github.martinkoster", name: "actionfx-testing", version: "1.6.0"
actionfx-spring-boot	This module contains Spring factories to use a Spring Bean container together with ActionFX. Additional Spring Boot is supported with the ActionFX autoconfiguration class AFXAutoconfiguration. When using this module, Spring @Autowired can be used instead of @Inject to autowire views and controllers (and even more services and components managed by the Spring bean container).	Javadoc	implementation group: "com.github.martinkoster", name: "actionfx-spring-boot", version: "1.6.0"
actionfx-controlsfx	This module integrates the components and controls of ControlsFX into ActionFX.	Javadoc	implementation group: "com.github.martinkoster", name: "actionfx-controlsfx", version: "1.6.0"
actionfx-app-sample	This module contains small sample applications how to use ActionFX with the default bean container using just the actionfx-core module and how to use it with a Spring bean container.	Javadoc	-
actionfx-appfactory	This module contains an executable ActionFX application to easily scaffold new, Gradle-based ActionFX projects. Aside from generating the required build files, it generates ActionFX controller from existing FXML files for enhanced productivity.	Javadoc	-