No JavaFX for iOS, Android or WP - why not?

[Richard Bair]

> Serious, non-rhetorical question: if you were a front-line developer right now what sort of job would you say to your customer "the best platform your needs here is JavaFX"?

Any serious application. I'm not talking about some web property like nike.com, but rather, all of the sales software or distribution software or whatever is running Nike corporation. With co-bundling and auto-update, you really don't need to build web apps for that kind of stuff. That's what I would be aiming for.

> The notion that once its all open source the community can do all the extra work to bridge the short commings is a bit of a fantasy. 

I should hope not. I know many developers (some of whom have already spoken up on this thread) happy to do a port. Android hasn't had any trouble getting 3rd parties to port Android to anything and everything. A new port of JavaFX is not a major undertaking, almost the entire platform just works.

> Firstly, it's going to take way too long to get there, established platforms are snowballing ahead as JavaFX struggles to catch up. We'll have HTML6 by the time JFX gets open sourced AND then the community gets round to adding features that needed to be in there 6 months ago to be competitive. 

That's just being silly. HTML 5 isn't even going to be here for a few more years, let alone 6.

> Secondly, where's the incentive for the community to do this?

If there is no incentive, then I guess you've proved the point, no? I should hope there is a large amount of incentive, as others on this thread (and many more privately) have verified. You act as though nobody has adopted JavaFX, but we're seeing a broad swell of adoption, especially among existing Swing developers. There are a lot of people who are developing for JavaFX commercially, and most of those people are not talking about it openly. Some very big customers in the lot. They love FX and are also committed to it.

Oracle funds hundreds of salaries based on JavaFX & Java client. There is a huge, heavy investment from Oracle. JavaFX is here for a long time -- we've got paying customers and we've got support contracts. Look, we got beat up real bad for not having Mac and Linux support at 1.0, people questioned publicly whether we'd ever do it.

Richard