jrubyfx native packaging not up to date ?

[amiracam]

apparently jrubyfx jdk 8 is still required or checked for although Oracle's JDK and packaging tools already support native packaging i.e. jdk 1.7x certainly 0_25, 0_45

is this a matter of an out of date check still being in place ?

thanks

-Charles

[edubkendo]

Yes, jdk7 includes native packaging tools but NOT the upgrade that allows us to use them on non-javafx apps which. You might think we ARE writing javafx apps, but unfortunately, only javafx apps written in java and launched by the javafx launcher count, as far as the older tools were concerned.

The update to the packaging tools I'm referring to was supposed to have been backported into jdk7, as early as jdk7u10, but it didn't happen. I've kept an eye on it since, but up until even a month ago, it had still never happened and my understanding is that it won't.

Then, there was talk about pulling out these packaging tools and making them available via Maven.Central for anyone to download, and I was going to integrate the native packaging with that, but again, it never happened the last I had checked.

But, it's really not a huge deal. You only need a copy of JDK8 to do the actual packaging for you. As far as which JRE gets packaged with the app, that can be set, (in other words your app can still be packaged with jdk7, even though 8 does the packaging) but you will need to write your own packaging task in that case. You can look at my code here, and the example in the jruby wiki: Packaging Native Installers with the JavaFX Ant Tasks to see how to do it. For any non-trivial app this would probably be necessary anyways because the number of optimizations, customizations and configurations needed to have this turn out professionally is pretty crazy. For example, people have written about what it takes to get one of these into the Mac App store, and its a good bit of work.