The Next Great Thing: An Application Framework

[Daniel Zwolenski]

Hi Richard,

Just for your info one of the challenges I have in contributing to the JFX
code base is the whole version management side of things. Since I am
working on deliverable projects I need my local dev environment and runtime
to be the latest stable release. With JFX being only partially open
sourced, there's the whole need for getting hold of these dependent jars.
I'm scared to download and install any new versions of JFX (beta or
otherwise) as I can't risk hurting my actual dev environment and I'm not
entirely confident I know what the 'install' actually does and/or how and
when the auto-updater will come into play.

It may be an ungrounded fear but I've had a fair few issues with JFX
browser plugins and JDK versions getting confused (probably partly related
to the fact that I have to work with multiple JDK versions, including 32bit
and 64bit) so I'm overly cautious. If there was a clean wiki page somewhere
detailing the steps to get the local build running (and those steps ideally
would not need me to actually install anything to get hold of necessary
jars) then I may be more adventurous - does such a page exist and if not is
there any chance we can get one? Otherwise I think I'll end up holding out
until everything is fully open sourced and clean to build.

The other challenge, and this will be the same for everyone, forever, is
time. There's never enough. Currently I am splitting what free time I have
between helping out on the forum, trying to evolve my JFX Flow project,
contributing to this dev forum and adding to my blog to show people ways to
build 'real' applications. Occasionally I also like to go outside and
sometimes even socialise ;)  I'm wondering what your thoughts (and the
thoughts of people in general) are on the best use of community time? This
kind of leads back to that community space I was rambling about a few
emails ago - somewhere (with more tools than just this mailing list) where
we can focus community efforts, coordinate and collaborate, and really make
use of the big community resource pool instead of us all throwing in bits
and pieces from the side. i.e. a revamped java.net or a total replacement
of it with the same end goals just executed properly.

In all brutal, practical honesty, the one area that Oracle is now
semi-obliged (for their own self-interest if nothing else) to invest money
and resources is in maintaining the core JFX platform/plumbing. Fixing bugs
and sorting out those low level features that the platform requires. From a
pragmatic perspective, it seems like the area where the community is better
to try and add benefit is in these middle-tier frameworks, such as
application frameworks, validation toolkits, etc.

What's the general thinking here, how do we get maximum benefit from our
resource pool that includes paid, full time Oracle resources working as a
managed team and coordinated by an organised management structure, as well
as a floating pool of part-time, add-hoc, random developers doing it for
kicks or glory, all flying solo and all with their own ways of doing things
and views of the way-it-should-be?

Cheers,
Dan


On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com>wrote:

> I'm quite pleased with the direction of the thread. One thing that has
> been on my mind is the need to get more community involvement in the form
> of code contributions. As Dan pointed out, working together, we can
> allocate engineering differently and make more forward progress. There are
> some things which I think fundamentally should be part of the platform
> (such as hooks in controls for validation) and other things which can be
> outside it (like how to visualize all of those validation messages).
>
> I'm quite pleased to see a bunch of JIRA features filed and much more
> pleased to see code contributions!
>
> On Feb 19, 2012, at 11:24 PM, Jeff McDonald <deep.blue.6802 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Insightful ideas and comments. To move things forward and to give the
> > conversation focus I've been working on a summary and some initial design
> > write ups. The goal is to create a list of actionable items to implement
> > which can be entered into Jira system to work from.
> >
> > Richard ... what would you like to see come from the discussion? Where do
> > you want to see this discussion go?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Jeff
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Michał Zegan <
> webczat_200 at poczta.onet.pl>wrote:
> >
> >> What about things like desktop, system tray and maybe even handling file
> >> icons/similar?
> >> It's also platform/library specific so it would be nice.
> >>
>