clojurefx

A Clojure JavaFX wrapper. Documentation and code can be found here.

Note that this library is brand-new and lacks a lot of features; I'm heavily working at it. Stay tuned!

Lots of neat features will follow soon!

Installation: [clojurefx "0.0.12"]

Short info about the state of the project

Right now I'm rather busy and have a few things to do on a deadline. That's why there's little activity right now. Expect more activity in about one to two months. I will not abandon this project. Feel free to add stuff (including tests) and send pull requests - I will review them in about two days and accept them if they're allright.

Overview

ClojureFX essentially is a thin wrapper around JavaFX built using a handful of macros and functions to make the usage of JavaFX more idiomatic for clojurians. The following macros are provided: fx, deffx, getfx, swap-content!, set-listener!, bind-property! and bidirectional-bind-property!. To run things on the JavaFX-thread, there's run-now and run-later.

API

Creating

The no.1 macro for creation is the fx-macro. Additionally, there's the deffx-macro which does the same as defn, except that it binds the new JavaFX object to a symbol instead of a function.

(deffx scn scene :width 800 :height 600 :root rt)

Instead of camelCase, the normal clojure dashes are used for the class names: button, check-box, v-box, ...
The keys for the options are the normal setters, without the "set" word at the beginning: :title :scene :root and so on.
Constructor arguments also are given that way, e.g. the :width, :height and :root in the example above.
You can directly add property bindings. Give them in a map with the :bind key, example:
```
(fx stage :title "Hello ClojureFX!" :bind {:title title-atom})
```

You can do the same for action listeners, just use the :listen key instead:

(fx button :text "Hide the window" :listen {:onAction (fn [_] (run-now (.hide stg)))})

And you can do it for child elements. Use the key content or children (equivalent). The value of this key must be a datastructure a function given to swap-content! would return.

Modifying

Child elements

Besides the possibility to use the normal Java methods, you can use the swap-content! multimethod to modify child-elements. The return value of the function you provide becomes the new content of the node.

This works for all layout classes as well as everything with child elements, like combo-box, menu, split-pane and so on.

Additionally, there are the helper functions fx-conj!, fx-remove! and fx-remove-all!.

Note that for split-pane and table-view you get maps; See the source code for details (bottom, "Class-specific wrappers").

Properties

Currently the only way to modify properties this library provides is using the bind-property! function. It expects an atom it will listen to, and whenever you change the atom value, this value will be propagated to the property.

Example:

(bind-property! scn :title title-atom)

It is also possible to bind multiple properties at once in bind-property!. Just use additional named arguments:

(bind-property! scn :width width-atom :height height-atom)

Other STM objects will follow.

Retrieving

To retrieve data from objects in a more idiomatic way, there's the getfx-macro:

(getfx btn :text) ;; instead of (.getText btn)
(getfx btn :armed?) ;; instead of (.isArmed btn)

Acting

Event handling is really simple. All you need is the action name and a function. Example:

(set-listener! btn :on-action [x] (run-now (.hide stg)))

Note that your function will get a map. See the source code for further details.

Adding support for custom JavaFX elements

To add support for element collections like JideFX and ControlsFX is simple:

Add the class names to the pkgs atom at the beginning of your program. The package name as a String is the key, the value is a quoted vector of symbols where each symbol names a class. Note that these names will automatically be camelcased, e.g. separator-menu-item in that vector will become SeparatorMenuItem.
You'll probably want to add methods to the multimethods preprocess-event, swap-content!, wrap-arg and construct-node.

misty000 / clojurefx