Does Java 8 delay mean less app developer feedback?

[Mario Torre]

On Thu, 2013-05-02 at 11:51 -0700, Richard Bair wrote:
> On May 2, 2013, at 10:05 AM, Mario Torre <neugens at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2013-05-02 at 08:56 -0700, Richard Bair wrote:
> >> I don't think Danno was making light of it at all, but rather was looking at "how can we solve this problem without waiting for Oracle"? which is pretty dang reasonable IMO.
> >> 
> >> 1) Once OpenJFX is fully opensourced, could the v8 targeted branch be compiled to run on JDK 7?
> >> 
> >> So this question is basically asking, when OpenJFX is fully open, can it be built and targeted at 7? In other words, maybe for your produce you could use OpenJDK and OpenJFX instead of Oracle's provided JavaFX 2.x? If this worked, then you could use the latest FX with an older JRE.
> > 
> > I'm of course very interested in 1) myself.
> 
> I'm interested, why is that? OpenJDK 8 is available under the normal friendly terms (I think?) so what is wrong with OpenJFX 8 on OpenJDK 8?

What I was referring to is OpenJFX 8 on OpenJDK 7. 

> > I would like to see the code base of what will be JavaFX 8.0, JDK 8
> > "free". Of course this also means to use a pre-release since OpenJFX 8.0
> > "1.0" will only be released when OpenJDK 8 will hit the shelves, which
> > basically means I'm lost with all the numbering :)
> 
> NOt sure what you mean?

I basically didn't understand this: If OpenJFX 8 needs to wait for
OpenJDK 8 we will see the first release of OpenJFX 8 sometime next year.

If I understood correctly, what will become OpenJFX 9 will be developed
inside the OpenJDK 8 timeframe (and co-bundled with Oracle JDK 8). Or
will it be rather based on early OpenJDK 9 and being developed
concurrently to OpenJDK 9?.

> > But on a more serious point, I think it would be good to have the first
> > OpenJFX 8 release to be JDK 7 compatible, and then move on it's
> > development by gradually introducing JKD8 features, reaching a JDK9
> > release which is JKD8 compatible, and so on…
> 
> What is the advantage? We co-bundle FX with JDK, both are auto-updated together, etc.

The advantage is to be able to use JavaFX 8 with *JDK 7, if JavaFX 8
will require a Java 8 runtime then there's no way this can happen.

Currently, it's only possible to use closed JavaFX (2.x) with closed
JDK, by having OpenJFX 8 being usable on OpenJDK 7 you basically allow
Linux distribution to distribute and help spread OpenJFX before OpenJDK
8 is released.

I understand Kevin point though, forcing OpenJFX to only use JDK 7
features and not take advantage of JDK 8 ones would be somewhat
limiting.

Cheers,
Mario