No JavaFX for iOS, Android or WP (original) (raw)

Mark Fortner phidias51 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 9 14:47:07 PDT 2012

John, The problem is we're not yet at a point where JavaFX components that can fully replace their Swing equivalents. And we may never get there if vendors believe that there's no market for it (kind of a chicken and egg problem).

Should JavaFX be able to reuse Swing components? I don't necessarily think it should.

Existing swing components wont have the CSS styling and would look out of place surrounded by a Rich UI. I feel JavaFX should be looking forward, as opposed to adding backward compatibility for various Swing libraries. When/If JavaFX is supported on multiple OS's like iOS, Metro, Android, would users want to see a Swing component, or would they like to see a JavaFX component that looks exactly like it should? I was speaking about desktop development/applet development primarily where all of the current Swing development occurs. The lack of CSS styling for Swing components doesn't bother me that much and would be tolerable as an interim solution until the JavaFX components are mature enough to be used as replacements.

Though there are swing component libraries that have the functionality that is needed in JavaFX, like as you mentioned JFreeCharts, but surely thats for a oracle/community to adopt and take forward. To see that the community needs and look to address that with a new feature of JavaFX, or a new JavaFX library. Swing libraries grew over time and started tackling the functionality that was missing in swing, like a property Chart AP, TreeTableView, etc, but we need groups like the JFXtras team to take up the baton. That being said, I hope the next release of functionally for the JavaFX charts is somewhat comparable to the functionality offered in projects like JFreeCharts

Most of the JavaFX libraries I've seen so far provide toy widgets, but not something that would necessarily be useful for corporate app development. Speedometer type dials, and battery gauges aren't really useful when trying to display financial or scientific data.

Mark

More information about the openjfx-dev mailing list