JFX as an OSGi service?

[Erik De Rijcke]

Hi Stephen,

We use JavaFX in an OSGi container, as a service component, in production,
so it's perfectly possible.

However there are a few gotcha's you need to take into account (I can not
c/p the code for obvious reasons...) which makes using it in osgi... quite
horrible :)

When triggering a javafx application in say, your component activate method
(as we do), you're actually creating a new javafx application instance, a
whole new identical object but without any scr dependency injection.

This is problematic as your osgi object has all the dependencies injected
from the osgi container while the javafx object does not.

What we do is this: in our activate we copy all our osgi dependencies, as
well as our ourself (this) to static fields, this makes them accessible in
the start method of the javafx object. When start is called, we store the
javafx object in a static field (which we access by calling 'this' in the
start method). We now have access to all dependencies and both objects at
any time. Now it's just matter of delegating calls from one instance to
another if needed...

btw, don't forget to call launch in a separate thread in your activate,
else you'll block your bundle activator thread indefinitely oh *and* sync
(block) your osgi component activate until the start method of your javafx
has finished else your component will announce itself activated while
javafx is still busy initializing.

Oh another gotcha, try to avoid using Platform.runLater, as that will only
work *after* your application component was activated, instead make a non
static runLater method in your osgi javafx application component and use
that. That will ensure that javafx was initialized before invoking any
platform run later.

Unfortunately javafx has a lot of static { Platform.RunLater} calls spread
out in different classes, so don't try to load those classes before your
javafx application was started... OUCH!

Didn't I say it was hairy and messy? JavaFX and OSGi is quite a bad match
unfortunately.

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 3:38 PM, Stephen Winnall <steve at winnall.ch> wrote:

> I am trying to make JavaFX 8 work with OSGi Declarative Services. My
> preferred solution would be to instantiate javafx.application.Application
> as an OSGi service.
>
> As I understand it, there are two ways of activating JavaFX:
>
> 1) sub-class javafx.application.Application or
> 2) call javafx.application.Application.launch()
>
> However, both of these approaches give me a POJO, which makes interaction
> with OSGi services and bundles very difficult.
>
> Is there a “proper” way of starting JavaFX as an OSGi service? If not, are
> there any plans to support this?
>
> Regards,
> Steve