Fixing NetBeans Gradle Support for OpenJFX

[Laszlo Kishalmi]

Dear OpenJFX devs,

As a quick introduction, I'm the main developer behind the Gradle 
support in Apache NetBeans.

Well, I must say they OpenJFX is using Gradle in a very original way. In 
order to make NetBeans to be able to be used for OpenJFX development, I 
need to understand some aspects on that build system you have.

According to my inspections, NetBeans has struggle to discover the 
dependencies between the sub-projects in JavaFX. At first I see two 
reason for that:

 1. For some reason version calculation is built in the script adding a
    second precision suffix to the output jar names. This breaks the
    dependency chain in NetBeans as it evaluates sub-projects
    individually (which could change somewhere down the road.). So
    expressing javafx:gracphics dependency would look like:
    javafx:graphics sources -> <javafx:base jar with a newer suffix>
    -/-> <javafx:base jar with an older prefix> -> javafx:base sources

    That could be prevented by removing line 1547: project.version =
    MAVEN_VERSION from the build script.

    It is a recommendation to handle version as an external property to
    the standard build process and specify it with -Pversion=<whatever
    version> on release time only.
 2. Unfortunately even removing the version out of the picture won't
    help as the generated classes of javafx:base goes into
    <javafx:base>/build/classes/java/main/javafx.base/ instead of
    <javafx:base>/build/classes/java/main/
    So far I couldn't figure it out how that happens. I'm not really
    experienced in modular java builds, just tested a simple modular app
    with Gradle and it did not generate the classes under a folder
    <app>/build/classes/java/main/<app module>/ just inside
    <app>/build/classes/java/main/. So I might miss something here which
    could make NetBeans be aware of this situation and check.
    My theory is that these classes are somehow moved during the build,
    then the dependency is set externally by specifying
    --module-source-path in the compiler command line arguments. As of
    the later NetBeans is not aware of at the moment.

So in order to understand the build more, my questions would be:

 1. What is the reason behind generating the version during build time
    (with seconds precision)?
 2. How the javafx base classes are ending up one folder down the path?
 3. Is it the --module-source-path on the java compiler which actually
    keep the the dependencies together?

Thank you, in advance!

--

   Laszlo Kishalmi