How portable is JavaFX 2?

Question

I am thinking of kicking off a JavaFX project on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine. What I am doing is designing a full-screen console application. It's not interactive aside from a barcode scanner.

I'm designing this for what I think would be an Ubuntu laptop or some other Linux variation, although a different Windows OS is a possibility too (as well as 32 bit). From what I understand Java FX version 2.x has made great advancements in portability from its predecessor, but I wanted to ask the community here what their experience was in deploying JavaFX apps.

Have you had success using them on a variety of different architectures? What are some problems you have encountered?

Answer 1

Checkout EstiMate for an example of an all-in-one jar which is runnable via double click.

https://bitbucket.org/atill/estimate/downloads

It requires Java7u10 installed. I plan to make a proper installer for it later on, using the javafx maven plugin. https://github.com/zonski/javafx-maven-plugin. I haven't tested it on Linux or Mac but it does work across winXP 32bit and 64bit windows7.

Answer 2

As long as your barcode scanner works the same on ubuntu as on win and you are not using any external libraries, you won't notice the difference between those systems from your app.

I found installing oracle JRE on ubuntu the most difficult task. (with JRE_HOME, etc.) Even on Archlinux was easier than ubuntu.

Nevertheless, once the JRE is set, your app will run even on Raspberry Pi (which is ARM not x86)

Remember about file system differences between systems.