As some of you may be aware, JavaFX has shipped a JMX plugin as a
separate jar file along with the JDK (not part of the JRE) in
<JDK>/lib/javafx-mx.jar. Development on this plugin stopped prior to JDK
8 being shipped, although we continued to ship javafx-mx.jar in JDK 8.
Are there any developers that still use this? We haven't seen any bug
reports or had questions on it for quite a while. I note that this jar
file has been gone from JDK 9 ea since build 111 and we are trying to
determine how best to address this in JDK 9.
Our options are:
1) Remove it entirely and drop this tooling support
2) Continue to ship it as a legacy jar file, meaning that any use would
require command line qualified exports to be added since it uses
internal packages
3) Turn it into a proper JDK-only module, javafx.jmx; it would not be
one of the default modules, so it would need to be added with -addmods.
Obviously #1 would be the least amount of work, and given that it isn't
being actively maintained, might be a viable solution. If we do need to
keep it, then #2 might be less effort than #3, while still preserving
the ability for developers to use it. This is only used for tooling, so
requiring qualified exports, as is done for Robot and
PerformanceTracker, is not a problem.
Separately, if we don't remove it for JDK 9, we probably will deprecate
it with the intention to remove it in a future release.
-- Kevin
