RFR: 8349373: Support JavaFX preview features [v2]

[Kevin Rushforth]

On Thu, 13 Feb 2025 21:53:25 GMT, Michael Strauß <mstrauss at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> Yeah, that's what I came to realize as well. So our property should remain boolean.
>> 
>> The only other thing I could think of is for us to provide a new utility method (in some class in javafx.base) that an application must call to register the version of JavaFX API that are compiling against. For example, imagine a `java.javafx.util.PreviewFeatures` class with the following method:
>> 
>> 
>>     public void setVersion(int featureVersion) {}
>> 
>> 
>> An application would need to call `PreviewFeatures.setVersion(25)` to use JavaFX preview features from JavaFX 25. That method would unlock preview features only if the version passed in matches the runtime feature version. This would be in addition to the boolean system property.
>> 
>> The question is whether it is worth the additional complexity (not for us to implement, that's trivial unless I'm missing something), but rather than documentation and burden on the app developer using a preview feature. The docs for each new preview feature would need to link to the PreviewFeatures utility class to describe how to unlock the features. On the plus side, it would provide a common place to document how to unlock preview features -- "call this method from the application and set that system property on the command line when running the app".
>
> I wouldn't be in favor of requiring application developers to call a method to unlock a preview API. It seems a bit too cumbersome and intrusive to me, since it requires you to embed build information into your source code. I've also never seen this in other libraries or frameworks.

> I wouldn't be in favor ... since it requires you to embed build information into your source code

That seems reason enough to abandon this idea.

> I've also never seen this in other libraries or frameworks.

True. Significantly, I didn't propose anything like this for the incubator modules, which can have the same problem.

So I think this is a good minimal solution that provide a clue to the developer that they are relying on API that is unstable and will change in the future (meaning that using such API is a risk they need to be willing to take).

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PR Review Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jfx/pull/1359#discussion_r1955355086