Android port status

[Stephen F Northover]

Hi Johan,

Have you signed the OCA (Oracle Contributor Agreement)?

Ok, let's bootstrap your port and merge it with the existing code after 
we are up and running.  I can see what looks like useful code in the 
"android" directory and we can either copy it over or merge your code in 
at a later time.  Let's continue this discussion in the JIRA.

https://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-35123

Steve

On 2013-12-31 3:47 AM, Johan Vos wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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.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
>
>
>