The Next Great Thing: An Application Framework

[Jeff McDonald]

Command line apps could benefit from being able to listen to and respond to
application lifecycle events. Command line applications aren't  (and
shouldn't be) a focus  for JavaFX, but maximizing the benefits to all app
developers with little or no effort benefits the entire Java ecosystem.
JSR-296 also included command line apps as a design consideration for that
reason.

There are many technologies that can allow apps to send data to one
another. The suggestion here is see if we can establish a common set of
needs and make it easier for developers write apps that need to communicate
with one another. This would a low priority feature in my estimation, but
would benefit app developers.

javax.print would require the inclusion of AWT into JavaFX, and possibly
the Java2D/Swing APIs. Having a dependency on any one of those libraries
would be a big step backwards. If someone wanted to make the point that a
printing API doesn't quite fit in with the objectives of an Application
Framework and should be a separate project then a good argument could be
made to support that view. JavaFX currently doesn't have a printing API. It
needs one, and one that doesn't rely on AWT or Swing. It would be nice to
have some modern features in a new print API. What features would need to
be added to Java would largely depend on the level of abstraction that we'd
want to support. Apple has done some innovative things such as creating the
Bonjour protocol to allow self discovery of devices (including printers).
AirPrint is another great idea that allows mobile devices to print to
devices without the need for driver installs and such. Printing to PDF
would be another nice feature. Some of those features are available in
native platforms, but they aren't universally available.

Cheers,
Jeff

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:13 AM, Michał Zegan <webczat_200 at poczta.onet.pl>wrote:

> Firdst, isn't standard java enough for command line, and java rmi enough
> for app communications?
> Second, javax.print looks like something thatis enough for printing, but
> it still requires java.awt for printing renderable images, so making a new
> DocFlavor or what?
>