Android port status

[Johan Vos]

Steve,

The main issue is currently getting bootstrapped. If we want to build the
Dalvik-runtime using open-jfx, we need a location on where to put the
dalvik files. This is what I tried to describe in
https://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-35123

Please note that we're not really doing an Android port, but a Dalvik port.
The (excellent) work done by Oracle in the past allowed for both using
Dalvik as well as an Oracle-internal VM. There are no indications that the
latter is ever going to fly, so I don't want to have an abstraction on top
of {Dalvik, OracleVM} if only the first one exists. I do hope there will be
other VM's (Oracle VM and more) later, as that will make it easier to have
Java 8 and so on, but right now we have to stick with what we have (dalvik).

Without these files, we can supply patches for existing files in open-jfx,
but by no means we can build the runtime. I do understand it is not trivial
to "add" a directory for the sake of a port, but then, a port is not
trivial as well. I'm open to all suggestions.
The longer we wait, however, with synchronizing the bitbucket repo with the
open-jfx repo, the harder it gets. Right now, I have no other option than
committing all changes in the bitbucket repo, as I need to be able to build
a runtime. We had 419 downloads of the runtime in 10 days, so clearly there
are people interested in this.

- Johan


2013/12/20 Stephen F Northover <steve.x.northover at oracle.com>

> 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.zipwith
>> 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
>>
>
>