JavaFX 14 – what’s new?
The JavaFX 14 release notes list a total of seven “enhancements”, but only two of them are really new features; the Text and TextFlow nodes have been given a new property that allows you to set the size of tabs, and a new property allows to switch off the cursor on embedded systems. On the Raspberry Pi, for example. On embedded systems, JavaFX uses Monocle as implementation of the glass windowing system. This system always showed the so-called hardware cursor, even if it was not needed. So-called kiosk systems should look more professional in the future.

The other five improvements are mainly in the category “Cleanup / Technical Debt”. Shared code of TableView and TreeTableView was in a utility class and could not be overwritten. This made it difficult to develop extensions. Two important components in the popular ControlsFX project could therefore no longer be used with Java 11+. Also, support for HTTP/2 in the WebView component is now available and GTK is now used on Linux systems for drag & drop instead of GDK. JavaFX 14 also brings a small optimization in the area of event dispatching and for the so-called “dirty bits” of node and scenegraph, a better data structure is now used.