Building OpenJFX

Building and Running OpenJFX

JFX consists of a forest of mercurial repositories. These repositories contain NetBeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ projects with the Java source, native projects and the scripts needed to build JavaFX components. A JavaFX component is a large and obvious unit of functionality, such as the user interface controls or the embedded web browser.

As you can imagine, building a UI toolkit for many different platforms is quite complex. It requires platform specific tools such as C compilers as well as portable tools like ant. The build and project structure of JavaFX like most large projects has evolved over time and is constantly being revised.

Building OpenJFX requires that you have the binary porition of OpenJFX. As of JDK7, JavaFX is co-bundled with Java so you will need the version of Java that matches the mercurial repositories you cloned. The rest of this document assumes that you are developing against JavaFX 8 (co-bundled with JDK8) and uses paths and naming accordingly.

Working with OpenJFX and JavaFX

Over the course of time, various components, projects and build structures will be contributed to OpenJFX until all of JavaFX is open source. In the meantime, you will need to download the JavaFX binary that matches OpenJFX for your platform and place your compiled code first on the class path. First though, you will need to download and install the tools needed to build OpenJFX and place them on your the command line path for your operating system.

Here are the tools required to build OpenJFX:

JDK1.8 Snapshot release
Ant 1.8.2
Mercurial 1.8.2
Cygwin (for Linux commands on Windows)

Here is the recipe for building OpenJFX (use a Cygwin shell on Windows):

mkdir -p ~/open-jfx
cd ~/open-jfx
hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx/8/master
cd master
mkdir -p artifacts/sdk/rt/lib/ext
cp <PATH TO JDK>jre/lib/ext/jfxrt.jar artifacts/sdk/rt/lib/ext
hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx/8/master/rt
cd rt
Edit build-defs.xml (comment out '<propertycopy name="javac.debuglevel" from="${ant.project.name}.javac.debuglevel" silent="true" override="true"/>' if not already commented)
ant

Note: JDK1.8 and the JFX contained within are are moving target, so you may need to refresh your snapshot periodically to match the items you are building.

In addition, the following files need to be downloaded and placed in "open-jfx/lib":

antlr-3.1.3.jar
antlr-runtime-3.1.3.jar
stringtemplate-3.2.jar

Certain parts of JFX, e.g. JavaFX/SWT classes in rt/javafx-embed-swt, depend on SWT being available at compile time. Environmental variable SWT_DIR or ant property swt.path can be used to specify a directory with swt.jar. If neither SWT_DIR nor swt.path are specified, no classes that depend on SWT are built. TODO: does it make sense to look for swt.jar in open-jfx/lib as well?

Here is the command line needed to run OpenJFX (using the controls jar from OpenJFX):

java -Xbootclasspath/a:<PATH TO HOME DIR>/open-jfx/master/rt/javafx-ui-controls/dist/javafx-ui-controls.jar:<PATH TO JDK>/rt/lib/jfxrt.jar" test.HelloButton

The above command assumes that you have a class test.HelloButton and that your OpenJFX directory is /Users/someone/open-jfx. If you have multiple versions of java installed on your machine, make sure you use the java that matches jfxrt.jar.

Coming Soon: Gradle Build for OpenJFX

The OpenJFX team is working on a replacement for our current build and test system. We have chosen Gradle as the basis for this new system based on its IDE support, community support, flexibility, and great command line support. This new system is still just coming online and will likely be a work in progress until March 2013.