Oracle is still committed to JavaFX and it will still be around for a while

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Hi,

I am starting in some studies on the main GUI technologies with JAVA in order to choose the best technology to develop our application. I am currently focusing on JavaFX, it is a very rich technology in term of features, widgets, etc, except I notice some rumors talking about the "End of Life of JavaFX" in Oracle such Shai Almog blog

Could you please clarify the future of JavaFX developments in Oracle? Is there a roadmap for JavaFX and it will still be around for a while or it is dead?

Best regards,

Hamdene BEN AYED

bekwam

I consult fulltime on JavaFX building business applications and don't see it going anywhere.  JavaFX wasn't originally part of the JDK and that separation probably hampered its adoption.  Also, in cross-platform business applications, customers may be reluctant to rewrite their Swing app as long as Swing is still available.

I wrote this post at the start of the year that provides a counterpoint to "End of Life".

http://bekwam.blogspot.com/2016/01/ground-floor-or-ground-zero-why-im.html

I can't speak to Oracle's plans or what they use internally, but JavaFX brings a WYSIWYG / CSS driven UI design approach that's in line with other successful development environments like Qt and XCode.

-Carl

Manius

So much paranoia about this kind of thing these days.    Really, if FX is being compared to some type of web solution (and that is what I am assuming here), is there any more risk than choosing the popular web-framework-of-the-month?  Heck you still need to bundle many libraries together for a complete solution (ex. Angular by itself does not cut it), any one of which could lose support some day.

The web guys LOVE to brag about how pervasive "HTML5" is--and yes it is pervasive, but they ignore the 500 lb gorillas in the room: the web framework fragmentation is STILL a huge mess in 2016, the "platform" implementations are still a crazy moving target that simply cannot be tamed, and in many ways HTML5 is not really living up to the hype that sold people on it.  Now Angular 2 is out or about to be out, with major breaking changes to Angular 1.x, and some are wondering if Angular will survive the update at all.  Will it fragment?  Will another flavor of the year take over the hype train?  Will Angular 2 be able to pull enough of the developer base (and hype) over before the excitement dies?

Who knows... in the mean time, "no-HTML communities" have been using the same stable, consistent, backwards compatible cross-platform runtime, quietly cranking out solutions for years.  I know there are some exceptions to that, but relatively speaking the only software platform that can compete with Java on all of those fronts is Flash, which has its own problems now.  All those Flash RIA developers need to go somewhere and I've never heard one complement the web alternative as better, or even equal.

FX is bundled with JRE 8.  Given that JSE 8 end of support is March 2025, (never mind 9 which will be out soon), it seems safe enough to say that it'll be around for years.  In ten years you're probably due for a total update anyway.

I will say, if you're doing some kind of general Internet-user centric type of application (except maybe a game?), you need to make sure you have a good case for JavaFX.  Gluon has an answer for Internet-mobile, but they are commercial (so again, depends on your situation and budget).  Now for a business application or specialty/graphical application--particularly where the network environment is standardized (ex. Java 8 pushed out to workstations via enterprise config management), JavaFX is extremely competitive.  I would say it's comparable to a secret weapon because many are too closed minded to think outside of the web world (including Java web start).  Their loss...it's fallacious thinking to assume that a technology needs to be the hottest, most popular thing at the moment to be worthy of adoption.