Setting Up Your Java 8 IDE: An Introduction to NetBeans 8.0 - Beginning Java 8 Games Development - page 31

NetBeans 8.0 also has Design a GUI drag-and-drop design tools for a plethora of plat-
forms, including Java SE, Java EE, Java ME, JavaFX, and Java Swing as well as C,
C++, PHP, HTML5, and CSS3. NetBeans provides visual editors that write the applica-
tion's UI code for you, so all you have to do is make the visual on the screen look like
what you want it to look like in your game application. Because games use the JavaFX
new media (game) engine, you will be learning about the JavaFX Scene Builder , an
advanced FXML-based visual design editor, in Chapter 5 of this topic.
JavaFX has the Prism game engine as well as 3D (using OpenGL ES [ OpenGL for
Embedded Systems]) support, so I will be focusing quite a bit on the JavaFX Scene
Graph and JavaFX APIs. The assumption here is that you will want to build the most
advanced Java 8 games possible, and leveraging the JavaFX engine, which is now a
part of Java 8 (along with Lambda Expressions), is going to be the way to accomplish
this. The fastest way to develop a game is to leverage advanced code and programming
constructs that the Java 8 and JavaFX environments generously give you for your use
in creating cutting-edge applications (in this case, games) that contain powerful new
media elements.
NetBeans 8.0 Is not Bug Friendly: Squash Bugs with a
Debugger
There is an assumption across all computer programming languages that the negative
impact to your programming project of a “bug,” or code that does not do exactly what
you want it to, increases in magnitude the longer it remains unfixed, so bugs must be
squashed as soon as they are “born.” NetBeans bug-finding code analysis tools, and in-
tegrated NetBeans Debugger , and integration with the third-party FindBugs project,
which, as you now know from experience (Audacity), can be found on the SourceForge
web site ( http://findbugs.sourceforge.net ) (if you want the stand-alone
version), all supplement the real-time, “as you type” code-correcting and efficiency
tools I discussed earlier (see the section “NetBeans 8.0 Is Smart: Put Your Code Edit-
ing into Hyperdrive”).
Your Java code will not be very complicated until a bit later in the topic, so I will
cover how these tools work when you need to use them, once your knowledge base is a
bit more advanced.