Quarterly Project Report

[Richard Bair]

This is the first quarterly project report for OpenJFX, which according to the bylaws I'm supposed to produce every 3 months. Better late than never ;-).

The OpenJFX project is moving along. We have been steadily building what I think is good interaction with the community. We've had invaluable feedback from many of you on a range of API designs and topics over the past year, for which we are truly grateful and, I think bodes well for the value of the project and the community in the future. We have open sourced all of the UI Controls and much of the Scene Graph, CSS, and related APIs. As per the recent announcement at JavaOne, we're going to be opening sourcing the rest over the course of the next few months.

Our project has an open JIRA issue database and, except for security issues, nearly everything is available to the public. I think on the Issue Tracking part of the project things are going quite well. One thing that we have not done well and need to improve on is taking Issue Votes into serious consideration when planning the next release. You should feel confident that your votes, and voices, are heard. As such, I'm personally committed to making sure the TreeTableView control makes it into JavaFX 8, as this is the second-highest voted for JIRA issue.

Our website, build instructions, build infrastructure, IDE support, and so forth are really bad right now. Jasper is working on a design for our website and we are making sure the wiki (https://wikis.oracle.com/display/OpenJDK/OpenJFX) is redesigned and organized and chock full of useful information. I'm working on our build infrastructure so that somebody can within minutes be up and running within their favorite IDE, whereas right now it is quite complicated to get a build setup. This is especially true when the rest of the platform is open sourced. It is usually a several day task for somebody new to the project to get a build fully setup and working, and even longer before they figure out how to be efficient at building / testing. This is clearly unacceptable because it doesn't scale and would be prohibitive for members of the community to be able to contribute.

Getting contributions from the community remains a very important milestone for the project. I do not expect to see many patches until we've succeeded in setting up a build / contribution system which is easy and provides nearly immediate satisfaction. I will be working hard over the next several months to make this a reality.

Richard Bair