Deployment

[Tom Eugelink]

I'm not sure that is within the realm of JavaFX, but more mor ein the line of Java in general. And I'm pretty sure the answer is in the line of WAR, because web deployment will not be the major format. It is not for Swing and it won't be for JFX; websites will service the web. And webapps seem to be the only format that have a good and successful deployment. Isn't it totally strange that after 10 years there still isn't a standard format to hand out a Swing app (or in this case a JavaFX app)? Naturally there is "one jar", but it has limitations (most notably things like the javaagent option), which is why I cooked up "app jar".

So things are quite simple:
- There has to be an all-in-one application file that can be distributed without any external dependency (as long as Oracle keeps sitting on that no JavaFX distribution, this will never work)
- That application file should then be wrappable in native installers for easy installing and uninstalling.
- There should also be a file format that downloads what it needs from a web server, and including that in a webpage should be a no-brainer, with all the required stuff generated as a separate HTML so that it can be linked or copy pasted.

All is doable, there are partial solutions already in place. It just needs commitment and some effort.

Tom




On 2012-04-19 23:16, Richard Bair wrote:
> You won't get an argument from me. The hard question is, how to solve it?
>
> On Apr 18, 2012, at 1:42 PM, Pedro Duque Vieira wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm very concerned about the state of deployment in JavaFX. Just yesterday
>> I tried the new example by Jim Weaver in
>> http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/weblog/tweetbrowser.html.
>> It doesn't work correctly in firefox nor chrome, only managed to make it
>> work on IE 9 64bit. And it appears I'm not the only one.
>>
>> Also the state of application installers for Java doesn't seem that good
>> either (I think).
>>
>> I think this is very critical, if the technology can't get to the users in
>> a transparent, simple, reliable way than you'll almost certainly won't get
>> it adopted.
>>
>> Thanks, best regards
>>
>> -- 
>> Pedro Duque Vieira
>