Yes Fabrizio, I agree with you. First it was iOS, then Android and now ARM. Oracle the company seem to view JavafX or their support for it as just a fancy Swing replacement to run exclusively on desktop operating systems like Windows, MacOS and Linux. But can we even trust that they will continue to invest in those platforms? The problem seems to be as simple that Oracle makes little or no money directly from JavaFX and being a very profit focused company, why would they care about it?
Their attitude now is that is you want JavaFX to actually work on anything other than the desktop (i.e. on all the modern devices that most people are actually using these days) then the "community" must step-up and make it happen. Thats a very disappointing and concerning attitude to say the least! Fortunately some in the community, notably Johan Vos and his company Gluon and Niklas Therning with RoboVM have "stepped-up" to try to fill this void but we are talking about a handful of people with shoestring budgets trying to get sophisticated technology working on an enormous range of complex and highly fragmented modern devices. How can they compete with a company like Qt which exists *only* to develop and sell Qt and have at least one hundred developers working on each of the iOS and Android ports and already have viable mobile apps using Qt selling out there in the marketplace. I really admire guys like this and wish that my own personal circumstances enabled me to get involved in a similar way but my main concern is that the "community" required to make JavaFX truly viable on iOS, Android and ARM needs to be about 50-100 times bigger than it currently is. Without an overall corporation paying the wages of these people, how is that ever going to happen? And by "truly viable" I mean making JavaFX a technology that can be used for *serious commercial application development *on all those platforms. Pretty gauges and simple square-based games are not enough to sustain or interest software houses to adopt JavaFX to develop their products and until that happens, JavaFX is going to struggle... Felix On 17 March 2015 at 10:53, Fabrizio Giudici <fabrizio.giud...@tidalwave.it> wrote: > On Tue, 17 Mar 2015 00:27:53 +0100, Kevin Rushforth < > kevin.rushfo...@oracle.com> wrote: > > Unlikely without help from the community, given that FX itself is no >> longer supported on linux-arm. We currently have no plan to add such >> support. >> > > Quite annoying stuff. BTW, I've just read http://www.raspberrypi.org/ > forums/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=97367 > > It's quite curious. I've just ordered a Raspberry Pi 2 and was planning > about writing a media center prototype with some ideas in mind. In the past > years I did lots of stuff with imaging and media, and was with Swing. I > struggled with tons of incomplete features in the imaging and movie APIs, > lots of additional libraries in order to have a decent modern UI (with > animations and such), because Java didn't offer them out of the box. In the > end I quit because it was frustrating to always be forced to fix something > at the basics level. I mean, I just wanted to focus on the application. > Now, fast forward some years and we have that Java FX, with bells and > whistles. I supposed I could at last enjoy writing an app on the RPI > without worrying about missing, incomplete, partially unsupported stuff, > but I was wrong. It seems that no matter Sun or Oracle, there's a sort of > curse preventing the Java ecosystem to fully work on the reference rich UI > hardware. > > Sorry for the rant, nothing against people of course, but that's just my > feelings at the moment. > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect @ Tidalwave s.a.s. > "We make Java work. Everywhere." > http://tidalwave.it/fabrizio/blog - fabrizio.giud...@tidalwave.it >
