As a very experienced developer who is new to the world of Java, JavaFX, and
NetBeans I have to share a lament about the current state of the tools.
It should be possible for an untutored user to obtain a working development
environment with trivial ease. It is not. Instead, one appears to have to
navigate a maze of version and vendor incompatibilities with no certainty of
success. Do I get my JDK from Oracle or someone else? Ditto JAVAFX and
NetBeans. And which of the dozens of downloads do I pick?
In my particular situation, I'm trying to develop a Java version of an MFC
app I built for my model railroad. As a hobbyist, that is - no commercial
product is in prospect. My current self-assigned task is to port the app to
Linux in the hope that I'll find more robust WiFi support than Win10 has. I
was hopping along as a happy little bunny with NetBeans 8.4 and some version
or another of the JDK that included JavaFX. I was misled by the incomplete
instructions for installing JNA to omit downloading jna.jar. Someone later
corrected my mistake on the stackoverflow forum, but not before I had
installed JDK 13, a current release of OpenJFX, and NetBeans 11.1. I ended
up in Version Hell, which is where you go when you have mismatched versions
of your tools. I don't even know what the path back might be.
My point here is that Java is supposed to be a platform independent
language. To encourage its use, though, those of you who are responsible for
its development and evangelism need to do a better job of bundling
self-consistent versions of the tools and/or providing a tool manifest that
someone like me can easily find and follow in order to download the tools
separately. NetBeans would be a logical place to test for AND CORRECT
version incompatibilities. I don't have the patience to help in that effort,
so it looks like I'll have to abandon Java and craft a Linux-only solution
in C++.
--
Walter C. Oney, Jr., Esq.
267 Pearl Hill Rd., Fitchburg, MA 01420
Tel.: 978-343-3390
<http://www.oneylaw.com/> http://www.oneylaw.com
