Anyone using JMX with JavaFX?

[Kevin Rushforth]

As some of you may be aware, JavaFX has shipped a JMX plugin as a 
separate jar file along with the JDK (not part of the JRE) in 
<JDK>/lib/javafx-mx.jar. Development on this plugin stopped prior to JDK 
8 being shipped, although we continued to ship javafx-mx.jar in JDK 8.

Are there any developers that still use this? We haven't seen any bug 
reports or had questions on it for quite a while. I note that this jar 
file has been gone from JDK 9 ea since build 111 and we are trying to 
determine how best to address this in JDK 9.

Our options are:

1) Remove it entirely and drop this tooling support

2) Continue to ship it as a legacy jar file, meaning that any use would 
require command line qualified exports to be added since it uses 
internal packages

3) Turn it into a proper JDK-only module, javafx.jmx; it would not be 
one of the default modules, so it would need to be added with -addmods.

Obviously #1 would be the least amount of work, and given that it isn't 
being actively maintained, might be a viable solution. If we do need to 
keep it, then #2 might be less effort than #3, while still preserving 
the ability for developers to use it. This is only used for tooling, so 
requiring qualified exports, as is done for Robot and 
PerformanceTracker, is not a problem.

Separately, if we don't remove it for JDK 9, we probably will deprecate 
it with the intention to remove it in a future release.

-- Kevin