The Next Great Thing: An Application Framework (original) (raw)

Jeff McDonald deep.blue.6802 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 9 13:10:20 PST 2012

Command line apps could benefit from being able to listen to and respond to application lifecycle events. Command line applications aren't (and shouldn't be) a focus for JavaFX, but maximizing the benefits to all app developers with little or no effort benefits the entire Java ecosystem. JSR-296 also included command line apps as a design consideration for that reason.

There are many technologies that can allow apps to send data to one another. The suggestion here is see if we can establish a common set of needs and make it easier for developers write apps that need to communicate with one another. This would a low priority feature in my estimation, but would benefit app developers.

javax.print would require the inclusion of AWT into JavaFX, and possibly the Java2D/Swing APIs. Having a dependency on any one of those libraries would be a big step backwards. If someone wanted to make the point that a printing API doesn't quite fit in with the objectives of an Application Framework and should be a separate project then a good argument could be made to support that view. JavaFX currently doesn't have a printing API. It needs one, and one that doesn't rely on AWT or Swing. It would be nice to have some modern features in a new print API. What features would need to be added to Java would largely depend on the level of abstraction that we'd want to support. Apple has done some innovative things such as creating the Bonjour protocol to allow self discovery of devices (including printers). AirPrint is another great idea that allows mobile devices to print to devices without the need for driver installs and such. Printing to PDF would be another nice feature. Some of those features are available in native platforms, but they aren't universally available.

Cheers, Jeff

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:13 AM, Michał Zegan <webczat_200 at poczta.onet.pl>wrote:

Firdst, isn't standard java enough for command line, and java rmi enough for app communications? Second, javax.print looks like something thatis enough for printing, but it still requires java.awt for printing renderable images, so making a new DocFlavor or what?

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