Classic, forgot to post to list. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Robert Krüger <krue...@lesspain.de> Date: Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 10:29 AM Subject: Re: JavaFx roadmap? To: Adam Granger <a...@adamish.com>
On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 11:08 PM, Adam Granger <a...@adamish.com> wrote: > The official java fx roadmap on oracle.com seems to have been taken down, > without replacement. > > http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/roadmap-1446331.html > > I've had a search in JIRA and there is clearly a lot of work going on. > > - What's the long term plan, target release dates, long term support dates? > We're interested in this at work, but need to know oracle is committed > to it. > - What about features like multi-touch on Linux? > - How will WebView ever keep up with the constantly evolving HTML5 platform? > - Is Swing development really over? As I am probably in a similar situation like you (wild guess) and I have posted questions here with probably similar motivation (making informed decisions regarding our product technology strategy), here are my two cents: Swing is likely to be available for at least another few years. It's not deprecated in 8, so earliest to deprecate it is 9 and 10 is not officially scheduled but Wikipedia guesses around 2018. Additionally there are probably many Oracle support contract customers out there that run Swing-based applications and I do not think it's likely Oracle wants to piss them off by rushing out of Swing. The amount of Swing development at Oracle (making new things like Retina support work) is something nobody can predict. Depending on your product, something like this may become a problem for you before Swing hits end of life. In addition to that there are probably a number of larger Swing-based Oracle applications (Netbeans being the largest one probably) that would have to be migrated to JFX (or dumped) before getting rid of Swing. Having said that, I don't think Oracle folks will likely say anything that encourages people to wait with their adoption of JFX for obvious reasons. The amount of work that is obviously put into JFX is significant (judging by following this list and Jira) and it does look very unlikely that it is going away. Regarding adoption of JFX for me there is a bit of a chicken-egg problem. My first research into migrating our stuff to JFX gave me the impression that it is a great platform to work with, easily learned by Swing developers with a lot of advantages over Swing regarding maintainability of code among other things but there are still quite a few bugs that simply show, it has not been used that much (as in thousands or tens of thousands of production-quality applications having been developed with it, not hello-world-style or free academic applications where people do not complain as much about problems) and that may be a reason to wait with adoption for some people (after all pretty complex high-profile applications like Idea still work very well with Swing although development, especially as look-and-feel customization is concerned, is very clumsy compared to JFX). Response to JFX Jira bug reports is outstanding, though. All in all not an easy call. Cheers, Robert
