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You're building a JavaFX library with properties that must appear read-only to external clients while remaining updatable to library code. How do you accomplish this duality? This post presents JavaFX 8's answer to this question.

The need for read-only exposure

Before I show you how to create updatable properties that are read-only to external clients, let's review how to define a simple property. Listing 1 presents the source code to a class that implements a counter property.

Listing 1. Implementing a counter property

import javafx.beans.property.IntegerProperty;
import javafx.beans.property.SimpleIntegerProperty;

public final class Counter
{
   private IntegerProperty counter = new SimpleIntegerProperty();

   public IntegerProperty counterProperty()
   {
      return counter;
   }

   public int getCounter() 
   {
      return counter.get();
   }

   public void increment()
   {
      counter.set(counter.get() + 1);
   }
}

Counter first introduces a javafx.beans.property.IntegerProperty field that defines a counter property wrapping a 32-bit integer value. Because IntegerProperty is abstract, I initialize this field to an instance of the concrete javafx.beans.property.SimpleIntegerProperty class, which implements the property. Furthermore, its noargument constructor initializes the property value to 0.

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