OpenJFX initiative

[John-Val Rose]

The concept of “innovation” no longer seems to apply to JavaFX, at least not from Oracle’s perspective.

If you read the official list of changes in the just-released Java 9, AWT (yes, AWT) has more changes than JavaFX and even then the only significant change is to make it Jigsaw compatible.

A product like this needs a very clear “roadmap” of development and introduction of new features but the link on the Oracle JavaFX Documentation page for “roadmap” leads to a place known as “404”. I hope that’s not a room number in “Hotel California”.

So, innovation for JavaFX falls back as a community responsibility but is very difficult without any cooperation from Oracle themselves.

I personally have not been able to get any response from them except “float your ideas on the mailing list to see what interest there is”. Note, that “interest” is only from the community itself... and then what?

What do you mean by “go with Johan Vos’s experience”? Yes, he and Gluon are fantastic innovators and have built a small company of top-notch talent and are able to crank-out new products and enhancements with impressive frequency.

Are you suggesting we all start similar companies? Johan is a former Oracle employee and probably has a well-established relationship with them and access to knowledge that others don’t. Personally, I love what he’s doing and hope Gluon expands rapidly to enable as much innovation as possible.

But what about the rest of us? What are we supposed to do? How do we get large-scale changes to happen?

Well, I don’t know. But we’re better as a team than a bunch of individuals each trying to get some feature implemented in an uncoordinated fashion.

The other real issue is that everyone seems to have their own perspective on exactly what JavaFX is or should be. That makes the community ineffective unless someone manages innovation for JavaFX in general.

I’d be happy to be that person but sadly, it’s not for me to make that call. Johan is like the de facto “Head of Innovation for JavaFX” at the moment but he has his own agenda (mainly in the mobile space) and monetises his efforts.

That’s what businesses do.

So, I think we need to firstly establish just what JavaFX is *now* (even this is not clear) and also what it *should be* (where we coalesce everyone’s own ideas) so we can move forward.

That is of course *if* JavaFX is actually going to “move forward” rather than “sideways”.

Honestly though, if you’re not moving forward, you are really going backward as you watch the rest of the world disappear over the horizon...

Graciously,

John-Val Rose

> On 22 Sep 2017, at 22:38, Nir Lisker <nlisker at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I didn't see any update on the idea for our initiative. Are we still waiting for a reply from Oracle or do we go with Johan Vos's experience?
> 
> I think that the least we can do without putting any work into this is have a semi-formal list of people who would like to work on this  and a list of what features we would be working on. I feel that I still don't know the scope of what we are trying to do, only pieces of it.