Best JavaFx container for manipulating long strings char by char - javafx

Question

I'm working with DNA data, in it's simplest form a name/id with sequence info:
public class FastaSequence {
private String name;
private String sequence;
{
The sequence is basically ATGGCTATCAC... for a few thousand chars long. I also have several hundred of these things to compare at any one time.
I need to be able to manipulate the chars in columns and cells, e.g. select the 125th char of each aligned sequence, in a GUI like JavaFX, so I was thinking to use TableView and convert the sequence to a list of chars and feed it to the table model as such. That way each char would get it's own column and I could like color all the T containing cells in red etc.
I have tried this with Python's TableView and I get a working prototype, but it's very slow to respond (loading a list, refreshing), even with a list of only a hundred sequences loaded. So my question is two-fold:
1) Will the JavaFX implementation be (a lot) faster than Python, even when loading a 100k or more cells?
2) Am I barking up the wrong tree and is there a better way to view/manipulate the data as I described it above? Should I be using another model?
UPDATE
I have been doing more research on this and found that the TableView in JavaFX is apparently not designed for huge numbers of columns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udc2iRZBF0M at 1:51.
So I went back to testing a JTable in Swing. Without further fluff it gives me a responsive (i.e. easy to scroll) table upto about a 1000 lines of a 1000 chars. However, making the TableModel a little more complex and using custom cell renderers to center chars in the cell and remove cell borders and such destroys the responsiveness. Because of the many things I've tried I'm not posting all the code here. If/when I come closer to a solution I'll update with my minimal (working?) code. Maybe I need to go back a simpler control like a custom class based on a grid based layout, without the overhead of the JTable and it's model?

Answer 1

You can try something like this to make an array of all the characters in a string:
String sequence = "ATGGCTATCAC";
char[] chars = sequence.toCharArray();
And then you can use System.out.println(chars[125]); to print out the 125th char in that sequence.
I've never used tables in JavaFX before, but I think you can do something like this:
TableColumn column = new TableColumn("Letter");
table.getColumns().add(column);
root.getChildren.add(table);
ObservableList<Character> data = FXCollections.observableArrayList();
for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
data.add(chars[i]);
}
table.setItems(data);