Position/Orientation of Reflection Effect

Question

I am writing an application that would benefit from a few well-placed javafx.scene.effect.Reflection effects. However, it appears this effect is hard-wired to reflect only along the bottom of the input Node, whereas I wish to add reflections around the left/right of a couple input Nodes.
That said, am I missing something simple here? Or do I need to open a feature request JIRA for enhancement to javafx.scene.effect.Reflection?
A second, related question is with regard to extending existing effects or implementing custom effects. I don't see much indicating javafx.scene.effect.Effect is meant to be extended by end-users. Am I wrong on that assumption? Has anyone successfully created their own Effect subclasses for JavaFX2?
Finally, if javafx.scene.effect.Effect is not meant to be extended, does anyone have any suggestions for implementing the Node reflections I described? I will happily submit a JIRA request if Reflection needs enhancement, but I fully anticipate it would be very low priority and would be completely outside of my control for implementing this effect within my application. If implementing this myself, the only thing I can come up with is creating a custom Region that contains the input Node, taking a Node snapshot of the input Node whenever layoutChildren() is called, and manipulating the pixels from the snapshot and updating an ImageView as needed. Does anyone else have any thoughts/suggestions?
Edited by: 941070 on Jun 19, 2012 4:41 PM

Answer 1

do I need to open a feature request JIRA for enhancement to javafx.scene.effect.Reflection?yes.
it's currently not opensource, so you can't modify it yourself.
I don't see much indicating javafx.scene.effect.Effect is meant to be extended by end-users.it's not.
well not yet anyway
there is not enough public api exposed to do this and if you use the private api, it is not documented and may be subject to change in future releases.
Has anyone successfully created their own Effect subclasses for JavaFX2?yes => see the wave effect in Jeff Friesen's blog post => http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/8034
Beware that if you use an approach such as this, you may need to modify your implementation for future JavaFX versions where a public api for Effect extension is exposed and deprecated private apis removed.
suggestions for implementing the Node reflections I described?a) create a snapshot of a node, place it in an ImageView, rotate the ImageView around it's side about the y axis or x axis, apply an Gradient Blend to the ImageView to fade it towards the outside edges.
b) create a snapshot of a node, place it in an ImageView, rotate the ImageView around it's side about the z axis, apply a Reflection to the ImageView. Take a snapshot of the reflection portion of the reflected ImageView node, render the reflection snapshot in an ImageView at the correct location on your screen.
c) take a snapshot of the node to image, read the pixels from the image using a PixelReader, create a WritableImage and write the transformed pixels using a PixelWriter. (this is pretty similar to your approach with a Region snapshot).
d) follow Jeff Friesen's approach to implementing an effect.
(I'd probably try option b first).
I fully anticipate it would be very low priority2.2 is in feature freeze, but if you submit now, there is a good chance that such a feature would be considered for 3.0. Perhaps, even a request for a public API for creating effects might be considered for 3.0 - it would be a useful feature for extending the platform capabilities. But if you don't file a request, you might never now. JavaFX is deliberately built to supply core functionality with the knowledge that certain important functionality is not initially exposed until a quality implementation and public api is requested by actual use cases and can be provided by the JavaFX team. It is user requests which provide many of the drivers for decisions on additional functions to add to the platform.