When developing custom controls for JavaFX I would highly recommend to follow in the footsteps of the core JavaFX controls and to make the API of your controls as final as possible and to put the “final” keyword in front of all your method declarations.
Example
In FlexGanttFX I have a lot of code that looks like this:
public final Activity getActivityAt(double x, double y) { ... }
public final Row getRowAt(double y) { ... }
public final void setShowLinks(boolean show) { ... }Why?
When you design a control you have a specific behaviour of the control in mind. This behaviour can be protected by using “final”. If you do not use it then other developers will subclass the control, they will override its methods, they will run into problems, and they will submit a defect ticket to your issue management tool. In the end you will waste your time on chasing their bugs. Bugs that only exist because your control was used in a way that you couldn’t possibly foresee.
Where?
Protection is especially needed for the public API of the control class, which is managing the “state” of the control. It is the contract between you and the user of your control. It is less true for the skin of the control, because skins are “implementation detail” and people modifying skins know that they are interfering with the inner workings of the control. You still want to make it easy for other developers to modify the “appearance” of the control.
New Concept?
Protecting your controls this way is not a new concept but it wasn’t used very much in Swing. The case for using “final” is stronger now because JavaFX controls are much more observable than Swing controls. They are exposing their state via properties and observable collections. This way applications can react to state changes by “listening” to the control instead of plugging themself into the control by overriding its methods. Another reason is the clean separation into “control” and “skin” in JavaFX. Swing components often had “skin” aspects right in the component itself and not in the UI delegate (e.g. paintComponent()).
| Reference: | JAVAFX TIP 4: HAVE THE FINAL WORD from our JCG partner Dirk Lemmermann at the Pixel Perfect blog. |
