FX'd ARM

I noticed Oracle have a developer preview for javafx on arm ... so I thought i'd give it a go.

My beagleboard isn't properly configured so I don't have EGL, but I did find an (obvious) option to enable software-only frame-buffer mode:

   -Djavafx.platform=fb

I also turned off the embedded mode, otherwise the mouse didn't work:

   -Dcom.sun.javafx.isEmbedded=false

Well it's definitely not speedy, but I did manage to get Ensemble to work, sort of. I'm not sure if it's so slow as it's crashed or just busy but i didn't get past the front page without losing patience (it's minutes) ... the mouse over animated tiles (e.g. 'Rotate Transition') manage about 1fps. The StopWatch is so slow it barely updates the screen, best I got was about 1fps out of that too.

BrickBreaker works (and whilst a bit slow does animate at multiple fps!), but I had trouble getting the beagleboard to output any screen resolution my old monitor liked ... so I stuck with the 1024x600 from the Oracle setup instructions, however at that size the paddle is off the screen.

Actually I was more interested in running it on the Kobo as that would be really interesting - but it fails to run there. Apart from complaining about the input devices it seems to crash opening fonts. I copied over libfontconfig from my beagleboard but that wasn't enough on it's own. I guess with a bit more work I could get it going (partially, i'm sure the E-Ink wont update properly) but I spent enough time just trying to get telnet re-enabled on firmware 2.0 on the kobo touch. The new firmware turns the radio on/off very fast so you have to be quick after starting the browser to telnet in and kill off nickel (otherwise, it just appears as though there is no network).

Actually now I have that going again (I've been using it to read books lately, and the 2.0 firmware was a big big improvement - even if i keep falling asleep 1 page in most nights and then lose my place as i flip a few pages with my hand as i fall asleep) I might revisit ReaderZ with the public JRE now available. Well, if I ever get the spare time ...

I noticed whilst using strace on the kobo that it's doing thousands of gettimeofday() calls, so it's obviously some sort of profiling build. Obviously software rendering is never going to be lightning, but I was using Java2D on the Kobo with adequate performance, so it should be fast enough for simpler scenes (using the embedded jre helped quite a bit there though).

Anyway, the news that JavaFX will be fully 'open sauced' by the end of the ?calendar? year is very good to hear.

But for now I have to delve into some mobile-to-server multi-client database sync stuff. Oh joy.