Community members such as Gerrit Grunwald have already demonstrated an application with a single JavaFX code base running on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS and even Raspberry Pi.
BTW, I totally disagree with you on your comments about the similarities of the desktop UIs and some sort of unique, device-specific UI on mobiles and tablets. The truth is, the desktop OS UIs are vastly more sophisticated than phone or tablet UIs and much harder to make look good in a cross-platform way. By contrast, there is usually very little to the actual "native" look and feel of iOS or Android and skinning a JavaFX app and supporting touch/gesture interfaces etc. is comparatively much easier. I think it's fair to say that (random) iOS apps 1 & 2 will typically look more different from each other than Windows apps 1 & 2. There is no point in focusing exclusively on a desktop solution as the majority of *new* app/application development is occurring in mobile and embedded space. It's true that there are several classes of application that will *always* require a desktop OS but we must move forward and ensure that JavaFX apps achieve a separation score of zero when evaluated against my "6 Degrees of Separation" defined here: http://justmy2bits.com/2013/09/30/javafx-on-ios-and-android-six-degrees-of-separation/ To me, JavaFX is the Holy Grail we have been looking for... or at least it *will* be when the iOS and Android ports are kicking arse. And I have *every* confidence in those fine people looking after those ports that they can do just that. Felix On 23 June 2014 21:17, Mike Hearn <m...@plan99.net> wrote: > > > > If it is correct that JavaFX won't be supporting iOS or Android > > (officially), IMO JavaFX will start fading away as soon as there is a > > reliable technology that can create apps for all platforms. > > > People have tried HTML5 as a way to create apps for mobile platforms. Most > of the big names who tried this e.g. Facebook have abandoned it. > > Personally, I don't care much about JavaFX on Android or iOS because mobile > has such different UI requirements and conventions to desktop platforms. I > can write a JFX GUI that looks and feels good across Mac/Win/Linux with > very little platform specific code because those platforms are all quite > similar and anyway, the respective developers of those platforms trained > users to expect apps to not fit in perfectly. > > On mobile, things are different: you can't just use a desktop UI, you need > a totally new UI and maybe even feature set built from scratch. On Android > the UI toolkit is closely linked with the lifecycle rules. And UI's tend to > be a lot more consistent, with the worst offenders being apps that weren't > updated to the latest UI conventions yet rather than apps which simply > reinvent the look and feel from scratch. > > I'd actually prefer that Oracle focuses on making a great desktop solution. > Hype aside there are still many apps not appropriate for mobiles or > tablets. Then with a Java or JVM-language backend I can have just two UI > codebases, one for desktop, one for Android and that gets most mobiles. > Then RoboVM's Cocoa bindings can be used if need be for iOS. > > BTW I don't think JavaFX can "fade away" given that it's starting from > obscurity already ;) Truth is the world lacks a convincing cross platform > UI toolkit at the moment: there's Qt, which is fine for C++ but is not so > pleasant from other languages, there's Swing, there's HTML5. Both Swing and > Qt have a reputation for making ugly GUI's. That may or may not be deserved > these days, but people remember the history. Plus deployment is horrible. > That leaves HTML5, which despite its manifest limitations at least can be > made to easily look good via CSS, follow modern fashions, work on > everyone's computers and people don't have to download an extra app > runtime. So for many apps it's appropriate especially when the bulk of the > app logic runs on a server. > > JavaFX 8, at least based on my experience so far, can be used to make > attractive and web-style UIs, thus matching the first of HTML5's > capabilities, plus it has the benefit of actually being designed, unlike > HTML which just evolved. This leaves deployment as the primary problem. For > this reason Danno is my current fav member of the JavaFX team :) Nothing > personal guys, I just see cross-platform deployment of *reasonable sized* > apps > to be the biggest competitive weakness right now. >
