[Fwd: JavaFX and JDK for ARM]

[Chris Newland]

Hi all,

Oracle have sadly had to scale back efforts on JavaFX for ARM but it looks
like they are leaving it in a good state to be picked up and carried on by
the IoT and OpenJFX communities.

As a bit of a JavaFX fan and general IoT tinkerer I'll be volunteering to
help out with this and it seems like a great opportunity for the Adopt
group to attract IoT people towards OpenJDK.

Would Adopt be willing to assist in this effort? I'm thinking mostly just
OpenJDK+OpenJFX build assistance (wikis etc.) and use of the CloudBees CI
farm.

Cheers,

Chris

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: JavaFX and JDK for ARM
From:    "Kevin Rushforth" <kevin.rushforth at oracle.com>
Date:    Wed, January 28, 2015 22:00
To:      "openjfx-dev at openjdk.java.net" <openjfx-dev at openjdk.java.net>
         "David Hill" <David.Hill at oracle.com>
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Many of you have been asking about the status of JavaFX in Linux/ARM
embedded platforms. Starting with 8u33, JavaFX has been removed from
both Oracle JDK for ARM and Oracle Java SE Embedded. [1]

This is a resource trade off within Oracle. Included in that difficult
trade off decision was the ongoing investment needed to properly support
FX in a world where so much the hardware is not standardized -- it
really is difficult to have enough hardware and testing resources
committed to support FX on ARM. It is important to understand that when
we say support, we are not talking about just "running" on a device like
the Raspberry PI -- but providing support for paying customers that are
almost certainly going to be using hardware that is customized for their
embedded product.

This does not mean that FX is going away on other platforms, and
hopefully does not mean we will be disappearing from ARM completely.

The core JavaFX team will continue working on the ARM port as resources
permit, hopefully with involvement of members of the OpenJFX community.
We have continued to demonstrate this commitment with the moving all of
the JavaFX sources to OpenJFX, and maintaining an up to date OpenJFX
Wiki which includes detailed articles on building for ARM.

We will continue to do what we can to make it easier to build and
overlay OpenJFX on top of the ARM JDKs.

We hope to arrange for a external build of OpenJFX for ARM so that more
people will be able to easily obtain a current build.

Most of the FX source code is shared across all ports, and we will
continue to do regular internal builds of linux-armv6hf to ensure that
it runs. We will continue to maintain the Monocle glass platform in any
case, as we use it for some of our dektop unit tests.

We have received a lot of help from the community -- particularly for
iOS and Android. Now we hope we can work together to keep Linux ARM
viable and interesting.

-- Kevin Rushforth and David Hill


[1] For more information on the decision, I refer you to the following
statement from Dalibor Topic and Donald Smith that Dalibor posted to the
Raspberry Pi forum.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=97367&p=678791#p678791

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Apologies for the terse release note regarding this change to the Oracle
JDK for ARM and Oracle Java SE Embedded products. Clearly this change
should have come with more context.

Starting with Oracle JDK for ARM 8u33 and Oracle Java SE Embedded 8u33,
JavaFX Embedded, a port of JavaFX 8 which was only available on
Linux/ARM platforms, is not supported, and has been removed from these
downloads.

The complete source code for JavaFX Embedded has been contributed to the
OpenJFX open source project in the OpenJDK community under the GPL v2
with Classpath exception license. JavaFX development has been done in
the OpenJDK open source community for some time now, enabling JavaFX
developers to contribute back their changes to the source code, and
produce their own OpenJFX binaries for their target platforms under
their own responsibility.

JavaFX continues to be provided as a fully supported part of the Oracle
JDK 8 product on x86 platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac).
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