Free Software JavaFX

I've been keeping a (rather loose) eye out on the availability of a fully free-software JavaFX for a while. Whilst all distributions now ship OpenJDK by default and that works fine for anything not JavaFX, the OpenJFX stuff has still been work in progress and hasn't generally been available.

Anyway I thought i'd try to compile it myself. Of course the first thing I noticed was that a preview build IS now available but I decided to keep going anyway so I could build a complete integrated JDK/JRE rather than having to manually link it in at runtime.

For the first part of the problem, following the build instructions was quite straightforward, at least on Ubuntu 16.04. I manually installed a couple of the specific build tools required and a couple of extra -dev packages. I didn't bother with building the bundled webkit for now. Even on this gutless under-RAM'd machine it didn't even take terribly long. I used the openjdk 10 for the compiler.

Then I looked into integration witht the jdk (later section in the build instructions). I was too lazy to read most of the build instructions so I just went with configure && make, although after a few iterations I settled on:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../configure  --with-import-modules=../../rt/build/modular-sdk \
  --with-jtreg=../../jtreg \
  --prefix=/opt \
  --with-native-debug-symbols=none
$ make product-images
  

Some time later it's all done and I ran some simple tests and Bob's your uncle. Stripping the debug symbols just reduces the size of the install (significantly) although it's probably worth keeping them at this early stage.

The slowest part was checking out the mecurial repositories.

Oh, I couldn't get the jdk tests to run :-/ jtreg just complained that it couldn't determine the JVM version. Trying to search the interwebs has so far been fruitless - it's not terribly important for now and I successfully ran the bootcycle-build which self-compiles after bootstrapping which is at least some bit of testing.

Update: Not sure where I got it from but the jtreg I had was out of date so it couldn't handle the new version string. Starting on the jtreg page got me the latest (4.2b12) and now the testing is running.

Torrents

Although this box doesn't have much disk it does have enough for a few big blobs so I thought I'd look into distributing a build (because, well!). To that end I sussed out setting up a private tracker and seeding torrents directly from this machine.

Anyway i've mostly worked it out but it isn't quite ready but i'll get to it eventually.

Java 11

With the short lifetime of Java 9 and 10 i've basically just ignored them completely - i'm still using 8.x everywhere. But Java 11 is going to be LTS release so it's probably time to start into it.

Having a fully free build of the whole platform is an important part of that for my hobby code. Now I just need the motivation ...

Update 2: And NetBeans, which is still not supporting a Java that was EOL'd 3 months ago. I'm sure they've nearly go the licensing sorted out though!

Update 3

Ok so I guess i'm a bit out of the loop (and search engines failed me again, it took me hours to come across this stuff, mostly by accident).

JavaFX is going to removed from the JDK. And additionally the JRE will also go away(?) and basically replaced with standalone platform-specific builds via jlink. Actually i'm not sure how the latter will work, maybe that's just wrt the openjdk; and in any event Oracle are committing to another few years of Java 8 releases.

Given that all the 'action' is server-side I guess it makes some sense. Just not for me!

Huh, I wonder why the current jdk build process allows linking in the JavaFX module then. Unclear. Just doing so breaks the tests so it's probably just the build system lagging slightly. Then again the make_runargs.sh script used to run against the javafx module doesn't seem to work against openjdk11 anyway. Well unless there's some other meachanism but neither javafxpackager nor javapackager get built - does jlink do all that now? So far my searching has been pretty futile and a lot of the documentation is either out of date or hard to find. I suppose it's still basically work in progress and/or i'm just not that motivated to dig deep enough.

Well I did waste the day anyway so whatever. At least AMD announced some nice hardware and Intel made an arse of themselves with their 'first' 5Ghz cpu demo which needed to be plugged into a fridge to run for 10 seconds.

Oh, there is also openjfx in ubuntu repos, but it only goes to 8. I can't remember if i looked at it in the past, probably did but I think I was looking at java9 at the time not realising how short lived it would be. I should've just stayed with 8.

Update 4

Well I did find something about running against the standalone javafx on this blog post. I guess all that javapackager stuff is gone or something since webstart and applets are defunct? Not that I ever used it anyway. Shrug.

Also apparently using jlink and making a partial copy of the jre for every application will be `easier' than just sending out a jar and having a central single installation of a jre. Wot?

Everyone seems to be a bit upset that Oracle are only going to provide commercial support for the oracle jdk11+ too - but given how much they've invested in making the openjdk feature parity I think they did ok for such an `evil' company. I mean, it's not like they forked some public commons like Linux or something as Google did.