I think JavaFX could have been more successful if they would have managed it differently. I really liked it. The JavaFX developers were all great to deal with

I think JavaFX could have been more successful if they would have managed it differently. I really liked it. The JavaFX developers were all great to deal with and would help you as much as they could. One of the problems in my opinion is that once you went up the chain beyond the developers, it seemed like there were some people that didn't understand what they were doing or didn't care or possibly both. They had targets to meet (or something) and the health of the project was a secondary concern. Part of this could be seen by the messaging saying they were investing in JavaFX, mobile, etc., but most of the commits to the repo were done by a few people. I can't remember what the numbers were, but I remember being shocked and thinking that if one of the top two contributors disappeared the project would be in trouble. However, the biggest mistake in my opinion was forcing JavaFX into the JDK way too quickly. You can tell that's the type of decision that comes from the top down. They wanted to be able to say the JDK had a next generation GUI toolkit and checking that box was more important than letting the project develop in a healthy manner. Before JavaFX went into the JDK it was really easy to contribute to the project via the dedicated bug tracker and you could get quick, friendly, helpful feedback directly from the developers. Bugs were fixed and would land in the next release. After it was part of the JDK you had to use bugs.jdk.com and it became much harder to participate. Factor in JavaFX having to adhere to the JDK release schedule rather than iterating quickly like they had been and it was impossible to figure out what Oracle was trying to do. Was having JavaFX on the JDK marketing material really worth stalling the development and ruining any chance it had of becoming more popular? I still can't get my head around it. The fixation on the browser plugin and applets always confused me too. It was obvious for years they'd eventually get locked out of browsers, so I don't know why they didn't push things like Web Start a lot harder. Web Start was a pretty decent distribution system and if they had improved it to fetch JREs, like OpenWebStart does now, it would have been one of the best options at the time. To this day I'm convinced that JavaFX was a missed opportunity. I'd love to try to build an app that uses Gluon [1] stuff for direct framebuffer rendering on a Raspberry PI with Mender [2] for distribution. I think you could combine something like that with JxBrowser [3] to build a digital signage system that's much better than anything on the market, but the licensing is a huge pain and too expensive for a hobbyist project. 1. https://gluonhq.com/products/gluon-embedded/ https://gluonhq.com/products/gluon-embedded/ 2. https://mender.io https://mender.io 3. https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser