Building Scene Builder

[Scott Palmer]

> On May 27, 2015, at 10:04 AM, David Hill <David.Hill at Oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> On 5/24/15, 10:56 AM, Scott Palmer wrote:
>> Where can I find the instructions for building Scene Builder from source?
>> 
>> 
>> I ran Ant in the apps/scenebuilder folder and it produced
>> SceneBuilderApp.jar in the 'SceneBuilderApp/dist' folder.  But where's the
>> rest of it?  It looks like the javapackager part does run automatically, so
>> I don't have a native executable with a nice icon and all those finishing
>> touches that make it a "real" app.
> I am in the process of adding a "run" command to the ant script. We do not have plans at the moment to add a packaging step.

What happened to the original packaging step?  The Oracle download is a packaged app, was it a manual step or something?  I can’t even find the application icon in the source.


>> 
>> I did notice the build output print a "jfx-deployment:" step, but I guess
>> that is something else. I haven't used Ant in years, so I'm a little
>> rusty.  I was actually surprised that there wasn't a Gradle script in the
>> apps/SceneBuilder folder.  I thought perhaps the apps are just using the
>> default NetBeans project format.  I then noticed when loading the project
>> in NetBeans that I didn't get the little "FX" decal on the coffee cup icon,
>> so it isn't a NetBean "JavaFX" project.
> When I added in the building of the apps in the overall tree, I was constrained by several things that gradle does not (or did not) play nicely with.
> We wanted to treat most of the items as independent sub projects, and at least some of them have ant scripts that needed to be included in the samples bundles.
> 
> To shorten the story, after a long while of tinkering, I found that for our purposes, ant worked better for us. Gradle imports the ant projects, and allows us to call into them.

Fair enough, there’s only so much tinkering one can take, I’ve been through a fair bit of Gradle tinkering myself.
(My hope is that one day OpenJDK + OpenJFX will build simply with ‘grade build', using Gradle’s support for native builds.  Especially on Windows where it would simplify things a lot if you can avoid dependencies on Cygwin or MinGW.  Gradle’s native support is still incubating so it is a bit early to go there, but I’ve used it recently for some Java +JNI projects on Linux, Mac, and Windows (with Visual Studio, not GCC) and it actually worked quite well.)


Scott