Refactoring JavaFX Builds & Sources

[Richard Bair]

>> Yes you are right, I am cheating as I haven't built the natives yet. BUT, that's because I am putting a plan in place to reuse the latest built natives (from a hudson job, for example) rather than having to recompile all the natives, so that your "typical" javaFX developer doesn't have to have a native toolchain installed, in which case the build really will only be a few seconds (by few, meaning, 17 or so I think was the last count). I'm on a 3yr old Mac. Richard 
> 
> FWIW, remember that eventually (JDK 9?) we will need to build as *part of* the JDK build.
> The folks working on the new build system are (as I understand it) prefer to
> move away from partial builds. Eg they expect you to have the top-level repo, hotspot
> and the jdk repo. And builds are claimed to be so fast it doesn't matter ..
> Also whatever the IDE support we have for Fx builds should not be "2 build paths"
> for us to support.  No one  wants to have test both if they can help it. So really
> IDE support needs to be another way to 'get at' the underlying support.
> And I am not sure if you'll convince the build folks that maven or gradle should
> be a JDK build dependency. Maybe you understand how this'll all work together
> but its not clear to me .. perhaps "modules" can or will be separate builds with their
> own rules but I don't know if that fits with the apparent direction on build-infra-dev.

I have thought about this, and I'm not sure how it will all go in the end. One advantage of simplifying the project tree is that changing the build system should be pretty straightforward if it ever comes to that. If we had to use make (gulp). we could even have it generate maven / gradle / whatever build scripts, as long as those were pretty simple. The last time I talked to the infra team, they had suggested "we can call anything from make" so I don't know if it will be an issue.

I figure, lets do something that is awesome now, and who knows. In a year and a half maybe we'll find from experience this really is much better, and affect change on JavaSE -- much like JIRA.

Richard