Constructing UIs with FXML Markup

The last language we cover is not actually a language, but instead a type of markup. With the JavaFX 2.0 release, they added in an additional XML-based markup called FXML that provides a declarative way of creating your user interface.

FXML is particularly useful if you want to be able to treat your user interface as data. This may be the case if you need to load portions of the scene graph dynamically from disk or network without restarting. Also, if you are using a UI builder tool, it is highly likely that it will generate an FXML-based UI that you can load in your application to which to bind behavior. To teach the fundamentals of how FXML works, we show you how to handcode the XML format and load it into your application.