Does webfx support gradle baesd project?

[reshoki12]

What if I have an existing JavaFX application which is gradle based. I tried to follow this along but had a hard stop as creating a matching POM for given gradle build was complicated.

Wondering if anyone has faced this?

[salmonb]

If you would like to port an existing JavaFX app to WebFX, you need to create a new WebFX project, which relies on Maven. Please note that you don't need to write the POMs yourself, because the WebFX CLI generates them all automatically for you, which frees developers from a big hassle. Your main focus will be on your Java sources (just a few adjustments in the webfx.xml - also initially generated by the CLI - may eventually be required).

As opposed to other standard libraries, WebFX libraries are made of hundreds of separate small Java modules (see for example WebFX Platform, WebFX Extras and WebFX Stack) that's why it's necessary to have a tool like the webfx CLI to generate the build chain (it wouldn't be manageable to write them manually - see for example the size of this POM). There are 2 main reasons for this approach:

1. Whereas in standard desktop Java projects you can afford to include big jars such as entire third-party libraries even if you actually use only a small part of their features (because it's not a big deal having a few more MB when installing a desktop app), this is not the case with a web app, where the installation and the launch are not 2 different processes. The WebFX approach ensures to keep the JS size minimal, which is very important on the web platform. The WebFX libraries can continue to grow and offer more and more new features without impacting the size of the projects that use these libraries, because the WebFX CLI acts like a Swiss Army knife regarding those dependencies and always keeps only the Java modules of the features actually used by the projects.

2. WebFX is a cross-platform framework, and therefore many of these Java modules (especially in WebFX Platform) are just API interfaces, and their actual implementations reside in other Java modules for each supported platform. Therefore your final executable modules (GWT, OpenJFX & Gluon) will have a different POM, each one including those platform-specific final Java modules. This technique relies on a fine-grained decomposition of Java modules.

Of course Java developers have their preferences (ex: Gradle over Maven) especially when they have to write those build files themselves, but since this is not the case with WebFX, I don't think imposing Maven is a big issue here.

If for some reasons it is (I would be interested to know them), I'm happy to accept a PR on the WebFX CLI to generate a Gradle build chain as an alternative to the default Maven build chain. But that's probably a big work for a contributor.

If you are still struggling to port your JavaFX app to WebFX, fell free to ask support on the WebFX-#general chat channel on Discord.