Android port status

[Stephen F Northover]

Hi Johan,

This is very good news.  We need to work together so that you are able 
to run OpenJFX unmodified.  This may not be practical for all sorts of 
reasons, but we need to seriously explore this and work towards this 
goal.  Please open JIRA for the various problems you are seeing and we 
can try to deal with them there and on this list.

Thanks,
Steve

On 2013-12-20 12:56 PM, Johan Vos wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As you might know, 2 months ago I started a community effort for "porting"
> JavaFX to Android. Today, we released build 3 of the JavaFX Android
> runtime, which can be downloaded at
> https://bitbucket.org/javafxports/android/downloads/dalvik-sdk-b3.zip with
> instructions on how to build applications at
> https://bitbucket.org/javafxports/android/wiki/Building%20and%20deploying%20JavaFX%20Applications
>
> Building the runtime itself is explained at
> https://bitbucket.org/javafxports/android/wiki/Building%20the%20JavaFX%20Android%20Runtime
>
> At this moment, most of the Ensemble suite runs on Android (positive
> reports starting with Android 3.x).
>
> The downloadable runtime is created using the bitbucket project at
> https://bitbucket.org/javafxports/android-graphics-rt which is a fork of
> the openjfx-graphics-rt mirror on bitbucket. We merge often, so all changes
> made in openjfx-graphics should be in the Android runtime as well.
>
> There are a number of issues left:
> * touch map issues causing applications to crash if "touched too much". I
> created a JIRA ticket for this and will create another one (related, but
> not same cause) later.
> * Java 7 only. Currently, applications cannot make use of Java 8 features.
> Dalvik has no invokedynamic, so we can't do lambda's.
> * we just started, so there will be plenty of other bugs.
>
> We are also spending efforts in documentation and community interaction.
> The google group javafxandroid has a pretty active mailinglist. Build 2 of
> the runtime has been downloaded 291 times in 2 weeks, and build 3 has been
> downloaded 60 times since it was released a couple of hours ago. So there
> is definitely community interest and involvement.
> Clearly, there is involvement from Oracle as well. Most of the effort so
> far has been done by Tomas Brandalik and the Prague team. I was positively
> surprised to see the amount of native code that was already available for
> Android.
>
> After a few discussions, it has been agreed that we should try to
> synchronize as much as possible with the OpenJFX repositories, without
> jeopardizing the stability and performance of the main ports, and without
> running into legal trouble.
>
> I will run a diff on the current code versus the OpenJFX code, and I will
> try to create issues with patches for sending the changes back to OpenJFX.
> Not all changes can go back to OpenJFX. We had to add a number of classes
> that are missing on Dalvik and that are used by OpenJFX, and clearly we
> can't commit those in OpenJFX.
>
> We had to make a number of changes to JavaFX files as well, in order to
> make them compile with JDK 1.7. Most of these were about removing Function
> and adding implementations for the default interface methods on
> ObservableList.
> I have no clear opinion on how these changed files could somehow be used
> from within OpenJFX, but I'm very open to suggestions.
>
> Finally, keep in mind that this is a community effort. Nobody is paying for
> this, and it is done in our spare time. I'm doing my best to move forward
> as soon as I can, but I have other things to work on as well of course.
> However, the collaboration between the Java community and Oracle (mainly
> Tomas) has been great so far. It is in the interest of anyone working on or
> with Java to show the world that JavaFX runs on Android devices.
>
> - Johan