Re: JMODs and Arm support

[John Neffenger]

On 4/30/19 8:41 AM, Scott Palmer wrote:

I noticed that there is a download on openjfx.io  for an 
11.0.2 Arm SDK, but no JMOD download for Arm.  Nor is there any 64-bit Arm download, 
making it a bit of an outlier since there are no 32-bit binaries for the other 
platforms.


On a related topic, I'm curious why the "JavaFX armv6hf SDK" is not 
provided for versions 12 and 13. It would be great to have the 32-bit 
ARM builds for each version available here:


Home » Products » JavaFX
https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/

I could provide those builds somewhere myself, but the page above is the 
only trusted source (linked from the OpenJFX Wiki and openjfx.io).


Thanks,
John

JMODs and Arm support

[Scott Palmer]

I noticed that there is a download on openjfx.io  for an 
11.0.2 Arm SDK, but no JMOD download for Arm.  Nor is there any 64-bit Arm 
download, making it a bit of an outlier since there are no 32-bit binaries for 
the other platforms. (The website should probably label this better.)  Is there 
any particular reason that JMOD downloads are not provided for Arm?  My build 
process is using JMODs to jlink a runtime and I now have a need to get this 
working on embedded systems, including aarch64.   I noticed that Bellsoft does 
supply an armv7/8 SDK with JavaFX modules included, but only for 32-bit, the 
64-bit version doesn’t include JavaFX.

The current practice of bundling the native libraries in the JAR files and 
extracting them at runtime seems to me to be a rather ugly hack - precisely the 
thing that JMOD addresses*.  I also expect the process of extracting a native 
library at runtime could lead to problems with anti-malware tools.   Is not the 
preferred mechanism to use link on a JMOD to produce a runtime with the native 
code in the proper place to begin with?
The Gradle scripts provided at openjfx.io  don’t support 
this model either.

I still can’t find any JMOD artifacts published to Maven Central.  I asked 
about this before and there seemed to agreement that publishing the JMOD files 
as artifacts was a reasonable thing to do.  I’m currently uploading them to our 
local Artifactory server to work around this.

*There is still an issue with the poor support for JMOD during development. You 
have to create a JRE outside of the JDK and wedge it in to your development 
process in order to debug, because JMOD isn’t supported at runtime.  I’m not 
sure if there are any plans to improve that situation.  For now I have ugly 
build scripts to use the .jar files for debugging and the JMODs for compiling 
and jlink.


On another note: Does the Arm version of OpenJFX support a desktop environment 
yet? Instead of forcing a fullscreen situation?  I would like things such as 
Dialogs and FileChoosers to work on a Raspberry Pi setup.

Regards,

Scott