Build desktop applications using Spring Boot and JavaFX

As technology continues to evolve, we can now use different technologies to build desktop applications. Spring Boot and JavaFX are one of the more popular choices now. This article will focus on how to use these two frameworks to build a feature-rich desktop application.

1. Introduction to Spring Boot and JavaFX

Spring Boot is a rapid development framework based on the Spring framework. It helps developers quickly build web applications while providing a set of out-of-the-box functional components such as security, database access, etc. Spring Boot can also be used to build desktop applications, providing developers with more choices.

JavaFX is an open source Java library for building rich client applications. It provides many features for building GUI applications such as layout managers, graphics drawing, etc. JavaFX also provides some additional features, such as support for multimedia, animation, etc.

Using these two frameworks can help us build a desktop application more easily, and the code quality will be higher. Next we will introduce how to use Spring Boot and JavaFX to build a desktop application.

2. Build a desktop application

1. Create a Spring Boot project

First, we need to create a Spring Boot project. You can use any IDE or directly use the command line. After creation, we need to add the dependencies of JavaFX. Here we use Maven to manage project dependencies. Add the following dependencies in the pom.xml file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.openjfx</groupId>
    <artifactId>javafx-controls</artifactId>
    <version>16</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.openjfx</groupId>
    <artifactId>javafx-fxml</artifactId>
    <version>16</version>
</dependency>

These dependencies will provide the libraries and resources required by JavaFX. After adding these dependencies, we need to create a startup class to launch our desktop application.

2. Creating a JavaFX application

Now we can start building a JavaFX application. There are two ways to create JavaFX applications: using FXML or using Java code. FXML is an XML format used to describe the JavaFX user interface. FXML files describe the structure, layout, and content of a window. It allows us to separate the design of the user interface and the business logic.

Our example here will use FXML files to create the user interface. We need to create an FXML file to create a simple user interface:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?import javafx.scene.control.Button?>
<?import javafx.scene.control.Label?>
<?import javafx.scene.layout.HBox?>
<?import javafx.scene.layout.VBox?>

<VBox xmlns="http://javafx.com/javafx"
      xmlns:fx="http://javafx.com/fxml"
      fx:controller="com.example.MyController">
    <HBox>
        <Label text="Hello, World!"/>
    </HBox>
    <HBox>
        <Button text="Say Hello" onAction="#handleButtonAction"/>
    </HBox>
</VBox>

The FXML file describes a VBox, which contains two HBoxes. Each HBox contains a label and a button. We will use an FXML controller here to handle button click events. This means we need to create a Java class to handle the events in the FXML file.

3. Add FXML Controller

We need to create a Java class to handle events in the FXML file. Here we will use @FXML annotation to bind methods in Java class to events in FXML file. Here we need to create a MyController class:

package com.example;

import javafx.event.ActionEvent;
import javafx.fxml.FXML;
import javafx.scene.control.Label;

public class MyController {

    @FXML
    private Label label;

    @FXML
    protected void handleButtonAction(ActionEvent event) {
        label.setText("Hello, World!");
    }
}

Our controller class contains a label and a method. The method will be called when the button is clicked. The method will update the label's text to display "Hello, World!"

4. Start the application

We have completed building the JavaFX application. Now we need to write a startup class to start our application. Here, we will use Spring Boot’s @SpringBootApplication annotation. The @SpringBootApplication annotation will scan all components in the application and automatically set the Spring application context.

package com.example;

import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.fxml.FXMLLoader;
import javafx.scene.Parent;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.builder.SpringApplicationBuilder;
import org.springframework.context.ConfigurableApplicationContext;

import java.io.IOException;

@SpringBootApplication
public class DemoApplication extends Application {

    private ConfigurableApplicationContext springContext;
    private Parent rootNode;

    @Override
    public void init() throws IOException {
        SpringApplicationBuilder builder = new SpringApplicationBuilder(DemoApplication.class);
        springContext = builder.run(getParameters().getRaw().toArray(new String[0]));

        FXMLLoader loader = new FXMLLoader(getClass().getResource("/fxml/main.fxml"));
        loader.setControllerFactory(springContext::getBean);
        rootNode = loader.load();
    }

    @Override
    public void start(Stage primaryStage) {
        Scene scene = new Scene(rootNode, 640, 480);
        primaryStage.setScene(scene);
        primaryStage.show();
    }

    @Override
    public void stop() {
        springContext.stop();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        launch(args);
    }
}

Our DemoApplication inherits the JavaFX Application class. When starting the application, Spring Boot's SpringApplicationBuilder class will scan our application and create a Spring context. The FXMLLoader class will load the FXML file and set it as the root node of the scene graph. We put the scene graph into the new stage and display it. Finally, when the application exits, we need to close the Spring context.

3. Complete the application

We have successfully built a desktop application using Spring Boot and JavaFX. We can use JavaFX to create very beautiful and powerful user interfaces, use Spring Boot to handle business logic, and use Spring Boot to automatically configure our applications. This article just introduces a simple example. If you want to try more complex applications, I recommend you take a closer look at Spring Boot and JavaFX.

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