RPTools.net

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1603497

It seems that there is now official third-party support for Java on Mac OS X. It appears that Oracle is moving forward and actually implementing their roadmap for Java, which included the release of the JavaFX 2 platform development kit, but also some significant enhancements to Java 7.

I'll try grabbing these over the new few weeks and playing around with them, but I'd be interested in hearing from anyone else who does the same.

Interesting. So we JavaFX will the fancy UI folks have requested for MapTool be possible?

As an aside, I installed Ubuntu 12.04. They are still recommending Java 6 stating the Java 7 isn't quite ready yet. Is that the general consensus for the Java developers in the audience?

You'll be missing JavaFX on Ubuntu anyway. Java 7 has some minor incompatibilities to Java 6. Some applications are affected [like MT:-(], some aren't.

So you're saying there aren't any plans to port JavaFX to linux? That seems kind of weird.

There are plans, it's just a matter of when. While the Windows(and now Mac) world get JavaFX(new version anyway) to play with linux will likely have to wait 6-12 more months). Typically, it has been Apple that has had such suckage. My guess here is that this is likely due to the LARGE change in linux based GUI's and wanting to wait until there was a most stable set of API's(GNOME3/Unity, I'm looking at you)

Well, I don't think so. Would they force all Linux users to upgrade to a more recent GNOME/KDE versions? Maybe X11. Since JavaFX works totally different than Swing, all the awt peer stuff can't be reused. They need much OS specific stuff for 3d, I guess they use OGL, but DirectX for Windows. I believe, this is a lot of work, in particular if you want things to work on older graphic cards.

I grabbed them for OSX. I noted the release notes for J7 state that Java plugin and Web Start support are not available yet.

I didn't check the release notes for the other platforms, so no clue what the issue might be on the Linux delay. I can think of a few things that might slow down implementing a port (window hints, 3d support (as username mentioned), and ICCCM compatibility being the big ones).

JavaFX will be available for Linux, their is a preview release available if you are game enough to try -- actually it shouldn't be that bad the preview releases for Mac OS X were quite reasonable -- this is a preview release of 2.1 so its not like linux will get an old version then will always be a version behind. The plan -- as far as Oracle has stated -- is to have the GA release before the end of this year and then the three major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux) will have syncrhonized releases for new versions at about the same time from that point onwards. From what I understand most of the hold ups in Linux have been due to graphics card driver related issues...



There is a lot of nice stuff in JavaFx2 that will help in the fancy UI department... Things such as

• HTML5 control, this is basically a webkit control embedded in your Java App (examples 1, 2,3)
• GUI controls are themeable with CSS (examples 1, 2,3)
• Media player that supports several formats (audio: mp3, mpeg4 with AAC, AIFF and WAV (PCM), video: FLV with VP6 video and mp3 audio, MPEG-4 H.264/AVC).
• Animations and transitions frame work
• Supposedly faster rendering than swing/swt

Although there are a couple of things we lose such as tooltips with HTML, and no docking frame works available (but apparently docking frameworks are so passe, who knew! I myself could take them or leave them. Although it is no accident that touch based GUIs don't have them as the two do not play together well at all).

Thanks Craig. That certainly seems to open up the future of the MapTool GUI a bit. The fact they've gone to HTML5 is good news indeed. If we were to keep the current macro ability to generate html we could unlock a lot of UI features for the frameworks.

And before everyone has a spaz attack, I just want to point out that Craig is referring to "tooltips in HTML", meaning the title attribute will not automatically generate tooltips in HTML.

It does NOT mean that a custom Java handler for the attribute can't do it, it just means that -- like so many things -- there would need to be some Java code required to provide it.

Overall, I think JavaFX is a big move forward in that it makes UI building in Java so much easier and moves it a little further towards the 21st century.

Ha!

Well, I kinda love the MapTool UI. Not because I think it's pretty or intuitive or anything like that. I love it because I'm able to get together with my friends again and game. I don't see the warts. I just see the fun.

here here!!! I am all for function over form if I have to pick one or the other...

With that said, I am excited about JavaFX though since it provides significant advances in html+css rendering. Swing is still behind the html+css specifications by 10+ years and that's pretty darn bad... Sometime's it's the simple things, such as for example:

• drop down lists with alternate row background/foreground highlighting, font dynamics(this row should be bolded while the rest are normal), etc.
• border radius.... rounded borders are a very nice effect
• box shadow
• gradient fills... makes nice buttons, sheets, panels, etc....

Just out of the curiousity since i am not a developer what does this mean for maptools going forward?

For the next 6-12 months or longer.. not a darn thing. For some point the future, it means the possibility to support much richer html+css user interfaces instead of being stuck with a user interface stuck in the past. Think of how much nice browser user interaction has become(not saying we would support all of that fully in MT!!!) since 1998 or so(which is about how old the html+css spec the current java interface "swing" is.)