Oracle's mobile JDK ports & JavaFX

[Johan Vos]

Hi Felix,

The Oracle Mobile JVM ports are headless so they are very complimentary to
the work done in javafxports/Gluon.
A couple of months ago, we tested the iOS simulator (created a JDK 9 build
and added a slightly modified javafxports version on top) with a simple
JavaFX app and that worked nice.
Have a look at https://twitter.com/eryzhikov/status/659148074397229056 for
a short movie on how it looks like.

In general, JavaFX just requires a JVM to run, and it doesn't matter if
this is provided by Oracle, RoboVM or Dalvik/ART.
However, having a single codebase for the VM that runs on desktop and the
VM's that run on mobile is a huge advantage. It is still early to tell, but
I am very excited about this project. With this project, you can write your
Java Client apps in Java 9 and run them on almost any device. Combine that
with JavaFX 9 and you have a great platform for UI development. One
codebase, one language, almost all devices. It sounds marketing talk but it
is the technical reality.

To be honest, I don't have too high expectations for performance at this
moment. But it is something that can be worked on. From what I've seen,
there are some really smart people working on it. I hope there will be many
contributions from inside and outside of Oracle to this project. So I hope
it results in faster apps, but don't expect amazing performance gains from
day one. Unrelated, we are still working on performance enhancements inside
JavaFXPorts, and those are mainly native so the VM won't have a big impact
on this.

We will add the option to select a specific JVM (RoboVM
free/commercial/OpenJDK/Android) in the jfxmobile plugin, and let
developers decide what they want to bundle their app with.

This blog post might be interesting to you:
http://gluonhq.com/gluon-supports-multiple-jvms/

- Johan


On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 9:05 AM, Felix Bembrick <felix.bembrick at gmail.com>
wrote:

> With Oracle now officially announcing their intention to port the Java 9
> JDK to iOS, Android and even Windows Phone, how does this impact or fit in
> with the current work being done through OpenJFXPorts and Gluon with JavaFX?
>
> Is it something that could be used with JavaFX, complementing the existing
> work or would it be a completely new strategy for porting Java and JavaFX
> to mobile platforms?
>
> Could it potentially result in a faster port of JavaFX on those platforms?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Felix