Dumping the rendering process in JavaFX

[Herve Girod]

Hello,

I think that more than one year ago, I asked if it was possible to dump the
JavaFX rendering process. More than one year later, I (or we, for I am
speaking on behalf of my project) are almost there. We use this in a
library for a "JavaFX to any format you want" converter. For example we are
currently able to convert a live JavaFX image to a PowerPoint slider (using
POI), or we also could do the same with a WMF / EMF / SVG image, keeping
the vector content of course.

What we did is hacking the J2DPrismGraphics class to render it in a custom
Graphics2D context which in turn can be a PPT / SVG / WMF / or EMF
serializer.

Our use case is the use of JavaFX in an Editor (no it's not a JavaFX
Editor, we edit graphic specifications for an avionics standard called
ARINC 661), and the ability to produce another Vector format with exactly
the same UI.

It works very well, except that of course we had to hack a few JavaFX core
classes to do that (obviously J2DPrismGraphics was not designed to allow
this). We did not recompile the core library, it's just separate classes
which uses com.sun classes when possible, or we used PrivilegedActions when
a method we needed was package protected.

But we have still a big problem (I think that it might be the only one,
except for the fact that our solution is an ugly hack, as you can see):

There is still one case where our solution does not work: Textures. In fact
we would have been able to convert JavaFX textures to BufferedImages if we
could use the Java2D-based Texture class, but of course as we did nothing
special, we encounter a D3D Texture (for example on Windows) which we don't
know how to deal with.

Which leads me to my two questions:

- Is there a programmatic way (even a contorted one) to force JavaFX to use
our own specific Pipeline (the idea is to be able to do this temporarily
when serializing the JavaFX content, so without having to use command line
argument)

- I think that it could be very useful to have a neutral and JavaFX -
supported way for developers to use their own Pipeline, even if it was
limited and with a lower than average performance. Being able to convert
from / to the JavaFX format is something that can be very useful.

Hervé