HEADS-UP: jfxrt.jar moving to jre/lib/ext

[Daniel Zwolenski]

Awesome. One small step, one giant leap! This will be a major annoyance
factor removed.

I'm not too up on the release dates, what date is this scheduled to go and
be released to general public end users (as opposed to developer releases)?
I need to make some changes to the Maven plugin (and docco) as a result of
this, which I need to try and schedule around my availability.


On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Kevin Rushforth <
kevin.rushforth at oracle.com> wrote:

> Regarding the following JIRA issues:
>
> http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/**browse/RT-26125<http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-26125>
> http://ccc.us.oracle.com/**8003171 <http://ccc.us.oracle.com/8003171>(CCC for above work)
>
> http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.**do?bug_id=8001533<http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=8001533>(already implemented in the JDK)
>
> As a heads-up, I plan to push the changes that will move jfxrt.jar from
> its present location in jre/lib to its new home in jre/lib/ext, hopefully
> in time for next week's EA build of JDK 8-b75. In conjunction with the
> recent launcher changes, this will have some impact that may be visible to
> applications (mostly in a good way, but there are some caveats).
>
> 1) jfxrt.jar will now be on the default application classpath used by
> javac and java (and javap, etc). This means self-packaged apps and apps run
> from class files no longer need to explicitly add jfxrt.jar to the
> classpath.
>
> 2) The java 8 launcher will now directly launch Java applictions from a
> jar file, even if they weren't created with the javafxpackager program or
> ant tasks. Further, the java launcher will now directly launch Java
> applictions from class files. In both of these cases the JavaFX application
> launcher will be called in preference to the main() method of the
> application's Main-Class.
>
> 3) Tools, scripts, programs that "know" where jfxrt.jar is relative to the
> root of the JRE will have to be adjusted accordingly, to either look for it
> in lib/ext or, if appropriate, just rely on the fact that it is now on the
> classpath. For example, when opening a JavaFX project in NB 7.2, it may not
> recognize your JDK8 as being JavaFX-capable. A future version of NB will
> add support for JDK 8 / FX 8.
>
> 4) Because we still include the javafx.embed.swt package in jfxrt.jar --
> see http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/**browse/RT-23041<http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-23041>-- applications that access javafx.embed.swt.FXCanvas will need to put the
> swt.jar library on the boot classpath in order for it to run.
>
> Let me know if you have any questions.
>
> -- Kevin
>
>