fxGames

What is this? This is a gonzo programming project, where I deliriously (though without intoxicants) blunder my way through the JavaFX library to see what I can make it do. Along the way, I'm rediscovering "best practices", and incidentally exploring features of Java I've only lightly touched on in the past.

My rationale is highly personal:

1. I still like building native, desktop apps, and have actual use for same.

2. JavaFX is a big beast, but it seems well-supported by a relatively broad community of users.

3. But my main language is currently Clojure.

4. Doing things like this in Java teach me JavaFX so that I can take the knowledge and go back to my real work in Clojure.

5. Working in Java generally reminds me of how much more productive life is in Clojure.

6. I mean, seriously. Java has massive ecosystems built-up to solve things that just never come up in Clojure.

   a. And it's good for me to experience the pain that necessitates those solutions.

7. JavaFX books are laughable.

   a. Actually, almost all tech books these days seem laughable.

   b. They teach you how to do the things you could figure out from the docs, pretty much.

   c. But when you put together an app, you run into all kinds of issues not in the books.

   d. In case other people want to learn JavaFX, I want to leave a trail that's easy to follow and hits all the issues, along with increasingly useful solutions.

As a young amateur, I coded in a very ad hoc, quick way, which worked until I ran into the limitations of my environment or my mind (or both). What this meant is that when someone said, "I have a solution to problem X," I could say, "Aha! I need a solution because I have had problem X many times!" And usually the solution (pure functions, objects, reusable libraries, etc.) was along the lines of what I had been thinking.

So for this exercise, I've done much the same things: I've basically slapped together code however I could make it work, which served two purposes:

1. I could get a handle on the basic task (JavaFX).
2. I could run smack into the problems that need solving.

Part I: Starters and, ugh, Tic-Tac-Toe

In this first commit, you have the complete product of the first 15 "chapters", building a tic-tac-toe game. We ran into many problems on this journey, from just getting started to the value of reactive programming. The task was building a basic starting interface, and then a tic-tac-toe game. Boring, I know, but sufficient to encounter many hurdles and quite frankly more complex a task than any book on JavaFX I have read, to date, has cared to tackle.

Part II will have its own branch, and each commit will reflect a "chapter", as we build a more complex game, the rules of which we don't even know up front.

Part II: Maze

Part II was supposed to be "Dungeon Slippers", but I quickly discovered I needed a grid component for that, so we spent a lot of time doing that. (Branch name "dunslip".)

Then, to test it out and make it usable, we ended up coding a basic maze, and then allowing movement through the maze, then having a minotaur in the maze, which allowed us to explore recursive functions with streams in order to find a path.

Part III: Dungeon Slippers

In part II, branch name "realdun", we'll build a puzzle game that allows the player to move a token around a board in an attempt to reach the exit.

I'll add code on an entry-by-entry basis so you can see exactly what changed. I did forget to add in the (very basic) ds-main.fxml in resoureces/dunslip until 2.3. Whoops!

I'm doing this part of the "book" at hashnode.