Android port status

[Kevin Rushforth]

As long as you've signed the OCA, which I see you have, that is sufficient.

-- Kevin


Johan Vos wrote:
> Steve,
>
> I've signed an OCA (my name is at
> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oca-486395.html) but since that
> mentions "glassfish work", I'm not sure this is valid for open-jfx work as
> well? Can you advice?
>
> I'll follow up on the technical discussion in the jira-thread.
>
> Thanks,
>
> - Johan
>
>
> 2013/12/31 Stephen F Northover <steve.x.northover at oracle.com>
>
>   
>>  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>
>>
>>     
>>> 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
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>       
>>