ScalaFX - A DSL for JavaFX in Scala

ScalaFX is an opensource project which aims to provide a concise DSL for using JavaFX with Scala.

Scientific apparatus, 1939, 1

Only very recently the ScalaFX project was restructured and it is now easier to set it up and build it - Peter Pilgrim did a great job setting up the sbt build. I want to describe what is necessary to get a maven project running which uses the ScalaFX project.

7 Steps to a running ScalaFX application with maven

(If you have tried out examples of this blog you may have installed the prerequisites already, so you can skip until step 1.):

-4) Make sure maven is installed:

Get it at here.

-3) Install Mercurial: 

Get it here.

-2) Make sure you are using a recent JDK (1.7.11 or newer):

Get it here.

-1) Install the simple build tool for scala

Get it here.

0) Execute following command and say "Y"

mvn com.zenjava:javafx-maven-plugin:1.3:fix-classpath

Ok, now you should be set up. Now the ScalaFX specific steps start.

1.) Check out the ScalaFX source code

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/scalafx/

2.) Install it into your local maven repository

In short:

sbt clean compile package make-pom package-src make-pom

mvn install:install-file -DartifactId=scalafx_2.9.2 \
    -DgroupId=org.scalafx \
    -Dpackaging=jar \
    -DpomFile=scalafx-core/target/scala-2.9.2/scalafx-core_2.9.2-1.0-SNAPSHOT.pom \
    -Dfile=scalafx-core/target/scala-2.9.2/scalafx-core_2.9.2-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar \
    -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT \
    -Dsources=scalafx-core/target/scala-2.9.2/scalafx-core_2.9.2-1.0-SNAPSHOT-sources.jar


will place a maven artifact in your local repository and suddenly you are ready to start coding with ScalaFX. (Skipping tests is of course bad and ugly ;-) )

You have to reference it from any maven project via

<dependency>

<groupId>org.scalafx</groupId>

<artifactId>scalafx_2.10</artifactId>

<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

</dependency>

3) Final step: Clone example project

Anyhow, after going through all this you can clone the scalafx-example project from github. It contains a ScalaFX program which looks like this:

ScalaFX DSL

You can import the project into Eclipse via "Import maven projects" or compile it on the command line via

mvn clean package

Entering

java -jar target/scalafx-example-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jfx.jar 

will show you the following:

ScalaFX HelloWorld

For more information about ScalaFX,  go to ScalaFX.org.