The Next Great Thing: An Application Framework

[Jeff McDonald]

Uclio,

There are a couple of people on this list that are working on JavaFX
projects on the Eclipse platform and OSGI. See
e(fx)clipse<http://efxclipse.org/install.html> as
an example. Tom Schindl is the Cheif Software Engineer on the project. So
there's already interest in the OSGI space.

Cheers,
Jeff

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Jeff McDonald <deep.blue.6802 at gmail.com>wrote:

> - I'm offering to contribute time and code.
>
> - Daniel bring up some important questions. What is the game plan for
> managing contributions? Will Oracle require an Oracle employee as a team
> lead?
>
> - There are some basic infrastructure and organization choices that need
> to be made. Perhaps they've been made, but I'm unaware. Please don't make
> us work on java.net :/
>
> - Is there wiki on how to contribute?
>
> - To answer Daniels question about version support. I think the idea is be
> able to build the code on your local machine and develop against your
> locally built jars and libs. That way you won't have to be worried about
> the JVM stuff as much.
>
> - 64bit vs 32bit could presents some issues, but those issues are most
> likely to be seen if you are working on code below the toolkit level. The
> layer above the toolkit is pure Java.
>
> What the current thinking for getting useful contributions from the
> community?
>
> Cheers,
> Jeff
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Daniel Zwolenski <zonski at googlemail.com>wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>> >>
>>>
>>
>>
>