I am investigating the feasibility of developing a JavaFX 8 control based on Canvas. I have chosen Canvas as the base class as this control is of a very dynamic nature and would not be easy to implement with a retained mode style ancestor (at least as far as I can tell).
So is this feasible? While I can readily see how to render the visual aspects of the control, I am not sure how to best "embed" other controls within it should that become necessary (and almost certainly will). For example, how would I go about embedding a Button within my control? It looks to me like I would need to create an actual Button node somewhere else in the scenegraph and then perhaps render it within my control using gc.drawImage() passing in a snapshot of the Button node. That's OK but then I have to somehow handle events and I am not sure how best to do that. Another issue I see is that there seems to be no way to apply effects to individual graphic elements within the Canvas as the applyEffect() method applies to the entire Canvas. Finally, a significant obstacle is this issue: https://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-23822 This issue relates to the lack of support for LCD font smoothing within Canvas. This may not sound that serious but the difference between LCD font-smoothed text in other controls and the grey-scale text in Canvas is so distinct on my current machine that a control based on Canvas would really stick out like a sore thumb and appear significantly less appealing than a "standard" control. So, am I wasting my time? Are there any other issues I am likely to face? Are there other ways to develop dynamic controls which may involve thousands of nodes (such as lines, curves etc.)? Thanks, Felix
