Call for Discussion : New Project to support the Wayland display server on Linux

[Johan Vos]

Thanks for starting this discussion, and for the great description of the
landscape and evolutions.
I've been looking at Wayland in the past, and as far as JavaFX concerns, I
believe there are only a small amount of changes needed in glass
(leveraging the fact that GDK can use Wayland as a backend), and then a
wayland version of the prism-es2 pipeline which should be relative small as
well.

- Johan

Op wo 7 jul. 2021 om 15:28 schreef Philip Race <philip.race at oracle.com>:

>
> For a number of years the Linux community has been working on a complete
> replacement for the 1980's era X11 desktop display server protocol
> with new protocols and libraries that support client-side rendering and
> a compositing desktop windowing system.
> This work is being done under the auspices of the Wayland project [1]
> and there is a reference
> implementation of a Wayland compositor called "Weston".
>
> A new client written for  the Wayland desktop has no dependency at all
> on X11, but Wayland also provides a compatibility
> mode where the X.org X11 server runs along side Wayland, so that
> thousands of X11 applications can continue to run.
>
> Presently all distros that ship the Wayland server, also still ship the
> pure X11 server and the user can select
> which one to use on the login screen. However there will come a time
> when Wayland is the only choice and
> already Wayland is the default on RHEL 8, OL 8, Ubuntu 21.04 and I am
> sure others too.
>
> At that time Java for Linux will "mostly" run via the X11 compatibility
> layer, but would not pass the JCK,
> since some important APIs,  notably those of the java.awt.Robot class
> [2] will fail with Wayland.
> We need to solve this so that pure Java and applications which mix Java
> and X11 APis can work.
>
> But even then this would mean Java on Linux is not a first class desktop
> citizen, which is not desirable for
> the long term, given the importance of Linux to many Java developers as
> well as to active
> individual and corporate contributors to the JDK project.
>
> Indeed there have already been informal discussions for some time with
> various parties that have expressed
> interest in helping towards the outcome of supporting Wayland
>
> Consequently we expect quite shortly to propose an OpenJDK project that
> will consider the goals of
> - a short to medium term solution for JDK running on Wayland in X11
> compatibility mode
> - a medium to long term solution for JDK running as a native Wayland
> client.
>
> There are some unknowns and questions, such as what are the options for
> supporting Robot ?
> What other support is missing ? What platform APIs should the
> implementation  use ?
> How does a native Wayland solution interoperate with OpenJFX ?
>
>
> Comments, expressions of interest etc are welcome.
>
>
> -Phil Race, for the Java client groups.
>
>
> [1] : https://wayland.freedesktop.org/
> [2] :
>
> https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.desktop/java/awt/Robot.html
>
>