I'm not sure of the context here. Use Gradle or Maven and their plugins do the heavy lifting. With Intellij the new project wizard will create a running "Hello World" project in a matter of seconds.

I mean. Would you have imagined that you can style the dots that indicate column sort order? Would you have imagined that you can style them differently for ascending vs descending? Would you have imagined that they wouldn't have documented this????

If your JavaFX UI isn't snappy, then it's almost a certainty that you've done something wrong. Unfortunately, the learning curve is pretty steep once you get past "Hello World".

Something like this (in Kotlin)?

The #JavaFX library is pretty complicated and the majority of the tutorials on the web are infinite copypasta loops. I've tried to provide some more insightful information on my website: www.pragmaticcoding.ca.

TornadoFX was mostly a DSL for #javafx layouts in Kotlin. JavaFX works great with #Kotlin without TornadoFX.

#JavaFX is 100% a reactive declarative UI development library. No FXML required. The Observables facility is tightly integrated into the UI components and makes React look clunky in comparison. Last I looked, #java supported loops and conditionals. JavaFX works great with #Kotlin too.

All the time. Going back to Java is painful.

This would put me off right away. Why get involved with something that starts off with dubious behavior? Also, I don't get the desire for something that feels like Windows. The less it reminds me about that hot mess the better.