JMODs and Arm support

[Johan Vos]

Hi Scott,

I can only speak for Gluon, so if others have other plans, they should
comment.
Our primary focus is to make sure the quality and availability of JavaFX on
the major desktop systems (win/mac/linux 64 bit) is guaranteed. That
requires lots of testing/building/infrastructure/bookkeeping. Rather than
doing too much at the same moment with limited resources, we wanted to make
sure that JavaFX had a smooth transition from being bundled with Java 8
towards being standalone with Java 11.

However, we see ARM and AArch64 as very interesting architectures for Java
and JavaFX, and we're currently investing heavily in this, so expect more
from us in this area.

As for the JMODs to Maven Central: I agree this makes sense, but I think it
would be even better if this was discussed with other stakeholders (e.g.
the jigsaw team and the maven team).

As for JavaFX on arm on RPi desktop: that should be working, but it might
be that this is not in the distribution yet. I had it working locally on my
Pi, where I had 2 JavaFX apps each in their own window, managed by an X
window manager.

- Johan

Op di 30 apr. 2019 om 17:52 schreef Scott Palmer <swpalmer at gmail.com>:

> I noticed that there is a download on openjfx.io <http://openjfx.io/> for
> an 11.0.2 Arm SDK, but no JMOD download for Arm.  Nor is there any 64-bit
> Arm download, making it a bit of an outlier since there are no 32-bit
> binaries for the other platforms. (The website should probably label this
> better.)  Is there any particular reason that JMOD downloads are not
> provided for Arm?  My build process is using JMODs to jlink a runtime and I
> now have a need to get this working on embedded systems, including
> aarch64.   I noticed that Bellsoft does supply an armv7/8 SDK with JavaFX
> modules included, but only for 32-bit, the 64-bit version doesn’t include
> JavaFX.
>
> The current practice of bundling the native libraries in the JAR files and
> extracting them at runtime seems to me to be a rather ugly hack - precisely
> the thing that JMOD addresses*.  I also expect the process of extracting a
> native library at runtime could lead to problems with anti-malware tools.
>  Is not the preferred mechanism to use link on a JMOD to produce a runtime
> with the native code in the proper place to begin with?
> The Gradle scripts provided at openjfx.io <http://openjfx.io/> don’t
> support this model either.
>
> I still can’t find any JMOD artifacts published to Maven Central.  I asked
> about this before and there seemed to agreement that publishing the JMOD
> files as artifacts was a reasonable thing to do.  I’m currently uploading
> them to our local Artifactory server to work around this.
>
> *There is still an issue with the poor support for JMOD during
> development. You have to create a JRE outside of the JDK and wedge it in to
> your development process in order to debug, because JMOD isn’t supported at
> runtime.  I’m not sure if there are any plans to improve that situation.
> For now I have ugly build scripts to use the .jar files for debugging and
> the JMODs for compiling and jlink.
>
>
> On another note: Does the Arm version of OpenJFX support a desktop
> environment yet? Instead of forcing a fullscreen situation?  I would like
> things such as Dialogs and FileChoosers to work on a Raspberry Pi setup.
>
> Regards,
>
> Scott
>
>