Why isn't JavaFX on the jdk1.7.0_u10build12 class path?

[Daniel Zwolenski]

Maven is biased to enterprise/JEE/webapps. Client side java has not been overly mainstream for a good while so mainstream tools are not geared for it. So yes, "nearly everything is non-standard" IF you are building a Java client app, and yes I feel (and share) your pain. Building a fully blown 'standard' webapp however works like a charm with minimal config and makes ANT look like a 'make' script. 

That same ease could be extended to client side builds though and the previous (recurring) conversations on this thread have been about tweaking jfx to make life easier in this space. Unfortunately it's not been a space the jfx team have seen as important. 


> This is what scares me about what is taking so long to simply put a single jar file on the classpath.  I fear Oracle is going to do something "fancy" and it is going to be another pain in the butt.  I'm hoping it is just a matter of "we aren't allowed to do that without bumping the major version number".  But even so a new VM option -XX+UseJavaFX would work.

I believe this is semi outside the jfx team's control. It needed official jre approval, hence the delay. I don't think anything "fancy" is planned. Once the red tape is cuti t'll just one day be on the jre path, much like swing or java.util. 

Personally I can accept a delay as necessary, but the decision to "half" include it in the jre was a very poor one in my opinion. Better to hold off completely and instead provide better ways to include it in our app bundles (eg make the DLL loading less fragile - 10 lines of code change could make a whole lot of pain go away). The half co-bundle just added to the pain. 

Java 8 promises to reduce some of this pain but project jigsaw already got canned so there's no solid pledge on what will actually be delivered. I personally believe native installers are the only potentially usable deployment option at the moment but they need a heck of a lot of improvement and there doesn't seem to be any noticeable activity in this area. The deployment team looks to be focused on security fixes (which funnily enough probably wouldn't be such a problem if applet and jnlp were ditched).