Project Proposal: JFX (original) (raw)

Mark Wielaard mark at klomp.org
Fri Oct 28 12:06:34 UTC 2011

On Thu, 2011-10-27 at 16:17 -0700, Richard Bair wrote:

As announced at JavaOne we (Oracle) would love to contribute JavaFX into OpenJDK as a new project called "JFX". For some who have been following along, we've talked about this for a long time but finally (finally!) we're ready to act on it and open source the platform. We are not just interested in open sourcing the code, however, we also want to move into an open development model. We already have an open bug database[1]. The project uses Mercurial, so we should fit in pretty well into OpenJDK.

That sounds awesome!

I admit that I had given up on JavaFX back in 2008 when it looked like it was just going to close up and added horrible proprietary licensing terms [1]. This is a very nice and refreshing change!

I do want to echo some of Ismael's questions/concerns though. What is the deal with the deployment tools? We got somewhat burned in the past when big announcements were made that the applet plugin and webstart tools would be liberated, but then nothing actually happened [2].

We were very lucky back then that people did keep on working on free replacements and through icedtea-web we do now have free deployment tools that can be shipped with openjdk.

So, forgive me for asking, but how strong is your commitment to really get rid of all the proprietary binary blobs that are currently needed for JavaFX? And are there any hidden gotchas for which the community will have to help to provide free replacements?

Thanks,

Mark

[1] https://gnu.wildebeest.org/blog/mjw/2008/08/01/the-javafx-trap/ [2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2009-June/000607.html

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