Build farm for OpenJFX (on ARM)

[Johan Vos]

Hi Chris,

That sounds great. I currently have a zip file for the ARM build at
javafxports, in the bitbucket download section at
https://bitbucket.org/javafxports/arm/downloads.
This is built manually, and a Jenkins CI build would be much better for
distribution.
We currently do the same for the mobile builds (iOS and Android), but that
is a little more complicated as they don't build out of the box from
OpenJFX (yet), so we have a recent mirror of OpenJFX code with
mobile-specific patches (that need to go back in OpenJFX) and another
repository that contains non-JavaFX code that is required to run on mobile
devices, along with build scripts to build the SDK's. If that could be
hosted by CloudBees, it would be great.

Do you already build the JDK for ARM itself using CloudBees CI? If so, can
those be combined?

Apart from that, building is one part, the sources is another part. It will
be important to have OpenJFX as the ultimate source repository.
I am to blame myself here, as not everything that is included in the mobile
builds has been sent upstream to OpenJFX.

The main reason for this is the quality. At this moment, the sorce code in
the OpenJFX tree is of a very high quality, and I don't want to send
experimental Android/iOS stuff before we really now it is working the way
it should work. We might see the same on embedded. When Oracle was having
resources doing this, I bet there were doing lots of internal tests that
made sure only the good bits made it to OpenJFX. When the broader community
steps in, we are sort of distributing this test-system. As a consequence,
people need to have access to early or experimental builds, on the other
hand you don't want to pollute the OpenJFX repository. This would work on
e.g. bitbucket or github, by using branches etc, but unfortunately that is
not possible with OpenJFX.

Anyway, I believe having automated builds based on the code in the OpenJFX
is definitely a good thing.

- Johan


2015-02-05 9:35 GMT+01:00 Chris Newland <cnewland at chrisnewland.com>:

> Hi Johan, all,
>
> Following the announcement that JDK builds for ARM will no longer include
> JavaFX I started talking with the OpenJDK Adoption group
> (https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Adoption/Main) about the
> possibility of using their CloudBees CI system to produce OpenJFX binaries
> (for all operating systems including ARM) as a way to help keep JavaFX
> alive on IoT devices.
>
> For those who don't know the Adoption group, its mission is to help
> developers get started with building OpenJDK, testing new features,
> submitting bug reports, and cleaning up code.
>
> Adoption has a CloudBees CI set up and I've been talking with Mani Sarkar
> (@theneomatrix369) about setting up an OpenJFX CI project with
> cross-compile support that builds OpenJFX for all archs.
>
> The cross-compile instructions here
>
> https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/OpenJFX/Cross+Building+for+ARM+Hard+Float
> are working great for me locally so now we're trying to work out how to
> move that to the cloud.
>
> I don't want to tread on anyone's toes here and we're not trying to become
> any kind of official source for JavaFX, just trying to make sure there's
> an easy way (e.g. binaries) for end users to add JavaFX to their ARM JDKs
> and to help people dip their toes into OpenJFX development as per the
> Adoption group's mission.
>
> Happy to coordinate on how we can make this useful and avoid any
> duplication of effort :)
>
> Personally, I'm a big fan of JavaFX and use it as the UI layer in JITWatch
>  (https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/jitwatch/). I'm also into IoT and
> wearables and think JavaFX would be great on the new Raspberry Pi 2.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
> @chriswhocodes
>
>
>