mobile status

[Johan Vos]

Hi,

Quick update from the mobile ports: as you might know, LodgON is working
together with RoboVM to work on the iOS port. There is some funding for
this effort, so we could add more resources to it.

One of the major goals is to have the Android port and the iOS port at the
same level. If an API works on Android, it should work on iOS as well and
vice versa. Most users of the mobile ports target both iOS and Android, and
we want to provide WORA and FOPFAP (Fail One Platform, Fail All Platforms
;)).

One of the major achievements is a gradle plugin we created, which allows
to build Android and iOS executables using the same code and the same
plugin. This plugin also retrieves the RoboVM AOT compiler form iOS
artifacts, and it retrieves the JavaFX SDK's for Android and iOS, which are
uploaded to Maven Central.
Both the plugin as well as the SDK's are built on our Jenkins server, and
uploaded as SNAPSHOTs to the snapshot repo. Builds are uploaded whenever we
feel a major achievement is reached.

The plugin is very easy to use, and it is described at
http://javafxports.org/page/Getting_Started
Note that we are currently at build 4 of the plugin, which uses build 4 of
the JavaFX mobile SDK's. You can point the plugin to use older or newer
versions of the SDK's.

One of the next things we want to do, is to integrate with the
java(fx)packager. In order to create our gradle plugin, we had to untangle
step by step what is needed to create an Android Package or an iOS Package.
If I understood it correctly, using these same steps should be possible in
a java(fx)packager plugin.

The other thing we have to do is to send all changes back to OpenJFX. There
is some work involved here, as we made both specific as well as a few
generic changes. However, I think that everyone could benefit from this
work. We have to redo all our homework, and check line by line if it is
really needed, working correctly, and not breaking anything.
I think it makes no sense for doing this in the 8u40 branch anymore, but we
should target 8u60 once 8u40 is released.

Finally, many congratulations to the whole team (current and past
developers) that created JavaFX. It is an amazing piece of software, and I
personally don't think there is a better UI toolkit available (at least for
Java developers like I am).
I hope the availability of JavaFX on Mobile can have a positive impact on
the whole JavaFX platform.

I'll be back later with more (also commercial) news.

- Johan