JavaFX and iOS - it will remain a dream

[Daniel Zwolenski]

How did you go with using Maven for your iOS stuff Tobi? Did it work out for you?

Has anyone else had a chance to get into it? I was hoping for more feedback on what works and what doesn't. Also hoping to see some open source demo iOS apps popup to start highlighting what works and what doesn't. 

http://www.zenjava.com/2013/08/01/javafx-on-ios-using-robovm-and-maven/

We all know 'Oracle' has a stupid stance on this, and reading between the lines the 'JFX' team are more on our side of the fence but are hamstrung. My personal feel is that the only hope is for the community to get the momentum going and to use that to then pressure Oracle into doing more. 

I've done what I can on the Maven front, trying to make it easy for developers to build apps. It's taken a lot of late nights and burnt up a lot of weekends (I even had to go buy a friggen Mac). I've reached my max for investing at this stage and need to take a little time to catch up on slipping day job work before the next round of fixes and enhancements. 

It would be great to see a real community effort here and see some people take up the baton and run the next leg of the relay. Both Niklas and Danno have done massive contributions so far too and I don't think they can be expected to carry the load alone. 

If you want to help give jfx iOS an actual fighting chance then consider:

- writing some demo apps using the maven stuff, blogging about it, feeding back problems and issues so we can start fixing them

- helping Niklas get robovm performant and feature rich (eg build a bundle for deployment to the app store)

- talk to Niklas about financially sponsoring his work - if a company or two were willing to pay for him to work on it an extra day or two a week I suspect we'd see rapid gains

- help maintain the backport run by Danno. Every time there are changes to the main jfx code we need to merge these into the backport. This is no small task. 

- help document the Maven plugin and generate usage information including a getting started guide and show how to do things like use FXML, change the app icon, change plists, run on older versions of ios, etc. 




On 07/08/2013, at 5:19 PM, Tobias Bley <tobi at ultramixer.com> wrote:

> Yes Felix, it *has* to be this year…. We do not port our swing based commercial apps if JavaFX does not run on tablets as well.
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> Am 30.07.2013 um 21:06 schrieb Felix Bembrick <felix.bembrick at gmail.com>:
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>> Hi Tobi,
>> 
>> I know how you feel.  As much as I am impressed with JavaFX, clearly its long-term survival does depend on it being viable on mobiles and tablets.
>> 
>> All I can say is don't give up yet.  I am certainly not giving up.  I really hope we see something at JavaOne this year that will please us all.
>> 
>> It *has* to be this year!
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>> Felix
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>> On 31 July 2013 02:40, Tobias Bley <tobi at ultramixer.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> after many days trying to really build iOS apps with JavaFX and RoboVM or Avian I’m very frustrated because of the following things:
>> 
>> Based on RoboVM, JavaFX on iOS runs unacceptable slow - I don’t know the reason - maybe it’s the rendering model of JavaFX - maybe it’s the currently unoptimized RoboVM
>> One big problem of RoboVM is it’s dependence of the Android library, it does not support the OpenJDK. That’s a big reason for many many problems when using JavaFX. So currently it’s not possible to use fxml files (FXMLoader) because of the missing Stax xml parser and classes like XMLInputFactory in the android library…
>> Avian: we tried to use JavaFX in conjunction with Avian + OpenJDK and AOT compiling… we hade no success…too complicated build process…no demos available for iOS…
>> 
>> So in my opinion „JavaFX on iOS“ will remain a dream…If there will be no big company like Oracle or IBM who actively develops a VM for iOS and Android, JavaFX will be useless, also on Desktop, then HTML5 or QT will be the big winner for the most use cases on Desktop and mobile…
>> 
>> Best,
>> Tobi
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>> 
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