AWT is somewhat dead, will JavaFX survive?

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Le 2024-10-01 à 00 h 33, Kevin Rushforth a écrit :

> And yes, we know that that there are missing features in JavaFX 
> relative to Swing like desktop integration and Image I/O to name two 
> important ones. I guess the question for you and other app developers 
> are: which ones are the most important that there be a native JavaFX 
> solution for?

Just for information (not really expecting this work in JavaFX, since it 
may be a major effort), one feature is the `java.awt.image` package (I 
don't know if this is considered included in Image I/O), in particular 
its capacity to handle Terabytes of Earth Observation raster data. This 
package was the foundation of Java Advanced Imaging (JAI), designed 25 
years ago by Sun Microsystem and Kodak with contributions of peoples 
from NASA and medical imagery. While JAI is not maintained anymore, we 
can still develop our own JAI-like framework on top of `java.awt.image`. 
Despite its age, that package is still amazingly powerful, even compared 
with modern competitors.

However, `java.awt.image` is complex. Having 25 years of experience in 
using extensively that package (and contributed a few OpenJDK patches), 
I think I see how it could be simplified and better integrated with 
`java.nio.Buffer` (for example) without losing its power. The 
`java.awt.image` package may contain features that seem obsolete today, 
such as MultiPixelPackedSampleModel, but those features are important 
when the images are Gigabytes in size. However, it would be possible for 
a new image framework to keep those features without "polluting" the 
public API with those specialized classes.

If an OpenJDK or OpenJFX effort was initiated for designing a successor 
of `java.awt.image` with the goal of being about as powerful, I would be 
glad to participate as a volunteer if accepted.

     Martin