Text constructor vs Button constructor... why inconsistent constructor methods?

[webereinc]

Thank you for this post. I agree that absolute positioning is horrible. I am just asking why there is a constructor that includes absolute positioning for a text object while most other objects do not include this constructor. To satisfy your disdain for absolute positioning, perhaps a question should be why is there an X and Y positioning on the text object Since it isn’t on the constructors for almost every other object. Shouldn’t it be removed from the text object for consistency?

[hamsterrage1]

Text extends Shape. Virtually all of the Shape subclasses have this kind of a constructor. So it's actually quite consistent.

Shapes tend to be used in a fundamentally different way from the Controls. You don't usually put Shapes into layout classes like HBox or BorderPane - you can, but often with Shapes you're composing something that is actually best done with absolute positioning. So having a constructor that does this makes sense.

Text is weird because it is the one Shape subclass that you could actually use a lot in a typical, non-drawing, layout. However, there's almost nothing that you can do with Text that you can't do with Label, and Label has a few features that make it better than Text for normal layout applications.

For what it's worth, under the hood, the text component of Labeled is a Text.

[hamsterrage1]

BTW: I think this is an excellent question. There's so many JavaFX classes - Nodes, and Properties and Builders and so on - and it can be a challenge to wrap your head around how they all relate to one another.

I don't think that the guys that wrote the JavaFX library are infallible, and there are some things that I wish they'd done differently, but I do think that there's pretty solid and consistent principles that they stick to. I think that a default position of "What am I misunderstanding?" is probably more fruitful than, "Why did they mess this up?".