Yeah, I still check on it every once in a while and I updated a small app to JDK11, but the industry has changed a lot since then. I know Java is still huge, but IMO that's in spite of Oracle, not because of them. The proverbial ship has sailed for me. If Oracle told me the sky is blue, I'd be looking up to verify it.
I completely gave up on JavaFX the day Microsoft bought Xamarin. My impression at the time was that Oracle just didn't care about JavaFX and barely supported their own developers. AFAIK they never did anything to encourage 3rd party developers even though there was some really cool stuff. Ex: Microsoft ended up owning RoboVM.
I also remember being frustrated the first time I looked at the JavaFX repo myself and saw how few committers there were. All the while Oracle would be simultaneously claiming they're investing in the tech, but actually dumping stuff [2] on the community. It's like they viewed open source as nothing more than a way to externalize costs for things they didn't want to maintain.
I never had the inside track on anything, so I don't know what the real story is, but my impression of it has always been that it was badly managed by someone higher up the chain than the people that managed JavaFX directly. Based on my experience everyone on the JavaFX team always made a ton of effort and tried foster a small but growing community.
Speaking of community, it was plagued with the same kind of doublespeak. Oracle would be on the mailing list telling everyone they wanted to work with the community [3] at the exact same time they were telling all of us to file our bugs using a plain text input box on bugs.java.com. How the hell do you submit a runnable test case using a single, 4 line high text box?
And if you need any kind of indicator to demonstrate Oracle's lack of ability to foster a developer community or provide developers with modern resources, go look at that bug filing system I keep complaining about. It's still the same awful system that looks like a holdover from the 90s.
This is all just my opinion, but I honestly believe Oracle squandered a huge opportunity with JavaFX.
I completely gave up on JavaFX the day Microsoft bought Xamarin. My impression at the time was that Oracle just didn't care about JavaFX and barely supported their own developers. AFAIK they never did anything to encourage 3rd party developers even though there was some really cool stuff. Ex: Microsoft ended up owning RoboVM.
I also remember being frustrated the first time I looked at the JavaFX repo myself and saw how few committers there were. All the while Oracle would be simultaneously claiming they're investing in the tech, but actually dumping stuff [2] on the community. It's like they viewed open source as nothing more than a way to externalize costs for things they didn't want to maintain.
I never had the inside track on anything, so I don't know what the real story is, but my impression of it has always been that it was badly managed by someone higher up the chain than the people that managed JavaFX directly. Based on my experience everyone on the JavaFX team always made a ton of effort and tried foster a small but growing community.
Speaking of community, it was plagued with the same kind of doublespeak. Oracle would be on the mailing list telling everyone they wanted to work with the community [3] at the exact same time they were telling all of us to file our bugs using a plain text input box on bugs.java.com. How the hell do you submit a runnable test case using a single, 4 line high text box?
And if you need any kind of indicator to demonstrate Oracle's lack of ability to foster a developer community or provide developers with modern resources, go look at that bug filing system I keep complaining about. It's still the same awful system that looks like a holdover from the 90s.
This is all just my opinion, but I honestly believe Oracle squandered a huge opportunity with JavaFX.
1) https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8091544
2) http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-Janu...
3) http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2015-Dece...