JavaFX initialisation craziness

UPDATE: Another post describes the solution.

JavaFX is Sun/Oracle's new user interface platform for Java. It has many features that are quite nice. But it has a few oddments that are hair-pullingly irritating.



The naïve among us might think that pushing the mouse button would indeed be wired through to MyBehaviour.onMousePressed, and "MOUSE PRESSED" would be printed. Apparently not.

In the language reference, there is this irritating line when it describes the initialisation order:

The values of the object literal's instance variable initializers are computed (but not set).

"but not set". Of all the evil villainous schemes... The MySkin and MyBehaviour objects are created, but MyControl.skin isn't actually assigned until later, so the following line wiring the mouse events to it breaks.

I keep finding that JavaFX is wonderfully concise, but really tricky to debug, and irritatingly fragile as many of its conventions don't do what you'd expect (like let you refer to an assignment you made in the previous line during initialisation, as in this example).