Skip to main content

Fixing "resource modena.css not found" in SBT

I have a project that is building a system in Scala. Its GUI is being defined using the ScalaFX system, which is a thin layer that delegates to the underlying JavaFX tools, components and features.

The application was running with a fine-looking GUI in early testing, but all the builds were being driven by the IDE. For various reasons, we wanted to migrate the build to the SBT system.

But upon launching with
$ sbt run
we would get entries like this in the console:
[info] Running StartHere
May 21, 2016 8:50:28 PM com.sun.javafx.css.StyleManager loadStylesheetUnPrivileged
WARNING: Resource "com/sun/javafx/scene/control/skin/modena/modena.css" not found.

The application would compile without issue and would run correctly, but looked terrible. For instance there would be no edges visible for buttons or for text box input fields.

Obviously, a dependency was missing from the build.sbt file. It was easy enough to add, with a line like the following:
unmanagedJars in Compile += Attributed.blank(file(System.getenv("JAVA_HOME") + "/lib/ext/jfxrt.jar"))

With that in place, the code continued to compile without issues, and the run no longer contained the warning. And since the basic stylesheet was now being found at runtime, the GUI once again looked like it should.


Why did it behave this way? I have not researched it, for the moment it was enough to fix the GUI and continue development. My guess is that it is rooted in the location of the jfxrt.jar which we, in past Java versions and past JavaFX projects, needed to occasionally move manually into the /lib/ext folder for some clients. In my Java 8 installation, the jfxrt.jar is already in that folder, so perhaps something in the dependencies of this project is expecting it elsewhere.

But why just at runtime? The stylesheet resource is not loaded at compile time, the compiler trusts that the requested resource will be found at runtime. In this case it was not.

Popular posts from this blog

How to do Git Rebase in Eclipse

This is an abbreviated version of a fuller post about Git Rebase in Eclipse. See the longer one here : One side-effect of merging Git branches is that it leaves a Merge commit. This can create a history view something like: The clutter of parallel lines shows the life spans of those local branches, and extra commits (nine in the above screen-shot, marked by the green arrows icon). Check out this extreme-case history:  http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/branch_madness.jpeg Merge Commits show all the gory details of how the code base evolved. For some teams, that’s what they want or need, all the time. Others may find it unnecessarily long and cluttered. They prefer the history to tell the bigger story, and not dwell on tiny details like every trivial Merge-commit. Git Rebase offers us 2 benefits over Git Merge: First, Rebase allows us to clean up a set of local commits before pushing them to the shared, central repository. For ...

Git Reset in Eclipse

Using Git and the Eclipse IDE, you have a series of commits in your branch history, but need to back up to an earlier version. The Git Reset feature is a powerful tool with just a whiff of danger, and is accessible with just a couple clicks in Eclipse. In Eclipse, switch to the History view. In my example it shows a series of 3 changes, 3 separate committed versions of the Person file. After commit 6d5ef3e, the HEAD (shown), Index, and Working Directory all have the same version, Person 3.0.

Scala Collections: A Group of groupBy() Examples

Scala provides a rich Collections API. Let's look at the useful groupBy() function. What does groupBy() do? It takes a collection, assesses each item in that collection against a discriminator function, and returns a Map data structure. Each key in the returned map is a distinct result of the discriminator function, and the key's corresponding value is another collection which contains all elements of the original one that evaluate the same way against the discriminator function. So, for example, here is a collection of Strings: val sports = Seq ("baseball", "ice hockey", "football", "basketball", "110m hurdles", "field hockey") Running it through the Scala interpreter produces this output showing our value's definition: sports: Seq[String] = List(baseball, ice hockey, football, basketball, 110m hurdles, field hockey) We can group those sports names by, say, their first letter. To do so, we need a disc...

Updating Oracle javapath symlinks on Windows

A Java-based application on my Windows 10 machine recently started prompting me to upgrade my version of Java. Since I wanted to control it myself, I declined the app's offer to upgrade for me, and downloaded and installed the latest Java 8 from Oracle. In my case, Java 1.8.0_171, 64-bit version. The upgrade went fine. But when I launched the app, it again said I needed to upgrade. Why was it still looking at the old location? I made the change using Settings, to change the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the location of the new upgrade. But no change, the app still insisted that I needed to upgrade. A little research into the app's execution path showed that it was using c:\ProgramData\Oracle\Java\javapath to find Java. When I looked in that folder, I found symbolic links to my old Java installation. Normally, this hidden bit of information gets updated automatically in the upgrade or installation process. I have read of cases where, when downg...

Multiple Remote Git Repositories and Branches in Eclipse

Sometimes, when using Git repositories and the Eclipse IDE, we want to access other remote repositories within the one we are currently using. One example, which I will use as the scenario for the steps below: a team converted existing code and its history to Git from another source-control management tool, with separate repositories for closely related but distinct release points. When they need to make a fix to a past release, on the past release's "hotfix" branch, they want to do as little work as possible to bring that fix into the current cutting-edge "dev" branch of their main repository. Other writers have offered How-To's for the git command-line steps to do so. What I will do is to show how the setup and configuration can be done within the Eclipse IDE (I used Mars for the screen-shots).