Apart from the fact that TornadoFX is essentially abandoned now, I’m not really a fan of it.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in the library, which has tons of extension functions and helper functions, that can be an inspiration for streamlining JavaFX layout code. So anyone interested in JavaFX with Kotlin should look at the TornadoFX source code.

What I don’t like is the builder framework that they have designed. It really doesn’t allow for extension to cover common patterns that a particular developer uses over and over. For instance, if you had a Label that you styled as a data tag and you use it over and over, then you might create tagLabel() function that you would call. But with TornadoFX, you’re going to have to create a builder of a builder function instead.

At the end of the day, I think you can create cleaner layout code without TornadoFX’s builder concept.

Finally, they add on their own, flawed (IMHO), implementation of MVC, which just clutters up and confuses the good stuff they had.