Chapter 24. Photo Management with PhotoBeans

So far, we've written libraries. We've written command-line utilities. We've also written GUIs using JavaFX. In this chapter, we're going to try something completely different. We're going to build a photo management system, which, of course, needs to be a graphical application, but we're going to take a different approach. Rather than using pure JavaFX and building everything from the ground up, we'll use an existing application framework. That framework is the NetBeans Rich Client Platform (RCP), a mature, stable, and powerful framework, that powers not just the NetBeans IDE we've been using, but countless applications in a myriad of industries from oil and gas to air and space.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• How to bootstrap a NetBeans RCP project
• How to integrate JavaFX with the NetBeans RCP
• The fundamentals of an RCP application such as Nodes, Actions, Lookups, Services, and TopComponents

Without further ado then, let's jump...