JavaFX packaging tools (was Re: JavaFX plugin for SBT) (original) (raw)

Werner Lehmann lehmann at media-interactive.de
Tue Nov 13 03:08:01 PST 2012

Hi,

let me hijack this thread to share a little detail I learned about the fx:jar task the other day. For the manifest I needed to reference dependency jars from several different directories. Those jars are also used for compilation so I have an Ant resource collection for those already:

 <union id="myjars">
   <filelist dir="${core.lib}">
     <file name="activation-1.1.jar"/>
     ...
   </filelist>
   <filelist dir="${guicore.lib}">
     ...
   </filelist>
   ...
 </union>

Using Ant's pathconvert I can convert this into a string suitable for the manifest class-path attribute. Now, with fx:jar the documentation indicates that I should use fx:resources to list jars needed for the class-path (or, JavaFX-Class-Path is what it actually generates).

Unfortunately, fx:resources is not compatible with Ant's resources, and it cannot reference them, let alone offer the flexibility of pathconvert, e.g. to prefix each jar in the path. So my nice and existing and lengthy resource collection did not work and I'd have to repeat all that for fx:resources.

This is a problem for Maven as well, it seems:

http://myjavafx.blogspot.de/2012/08/building-signing-and-deploying-your.html

This blog post showed that you can simply ignore fx:resources and continue to provide the class-path yourself. It wouldn't have occurred to me :)

So I can still do this:

 <fx:jar destfile="...">
   <fx:application name="..." mainClass="..."/>
   <fileset dir="..."/>
   <manifest>
     <attribute name="Built-By" value="..."/>
     <attribute name="JavaFX-Class-Path" value="my.dist-classpath}"/>
   </manifest>
 </fx:jar>

Whereas my.dist-classpath is provided by pathconvert (with a chainedmapper, flattenmapper, globmapper) and generated from myjars.

Might be useful for somebody.

Rgds Werner

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