i work for an enterprise software firm with a big java/kotlin investment

and we work in a high security space. so .... i'm keen on making javafx / tornadofx viable for large enterprise use cases (banks mostly but other finance and supply chain industry use cases too)

i have a dev team too. but at the moment we're flooded with higher priorities.

i wrote three blog posts about a much more ambitious project (a total replacement for the entire web stack), which is more than what i'm proposing here

but it has some ideas

if you want to set up a mailing list or a dedicated channel for the concept somewhere, let me know!

@mikehearn this would be awesome to see. I'm flooded with priorities too but I'd like to engage with this project.

let's invent a snappy name and create a slack channel here, as it's fair to assume we'd use kotlin to implemnet it

and we can kick ideas around, even if we get no time to implement it, we might come up with some useful designs

but we need a name first

@mikehearn Agree with @thomasnield that this is a great idea. I'm a big fan of Swing/JavaFX. We use it internally for applications that I'm not able to share, but I would interested in anything you guys come up with... I'm happy to help, but my time is limited too... not that anyone else's isn't 🙂 All that to say, it would be great to try it you want...

@mikehearn I've heard @edvin talking about forking JavaFX and porting it to Kotlin. We really should figure out supported standards and all that, and not fragment the JavaFX community too much with whatever streamlining we create.

And yes I think most folks use JavaFX for secret internal applications. Southwest has a ton written in Swing and JavaFX.

@mikehearn PortalFX sounds spiffy

@thomasnield No idea on a name, but would suggest/prefer nothing tied to FX, Java, Kotlin, or Desktop... something generic enough to evolve if needed... 🙂

@thomasnield It is not only “secret internal applications”. Lots of professional and semi-pro app, too. I’ve been a principal architect and developer for thinkorswim application (from TD Ameritrate now, formerly independent firm). It is 100% Swing used by millions of traders. Now I’m at JetBrains with all their flagship products in Swing.

Keep in mind also guys that Kotlin/Native is on the horizon. Let's not chase a large effort only to have them deprecated by a possibly better solution later. Althoguh I don't see myself getting of the JavaFX bandwagon anytime soon.

☝️ I've wanted to explore this UI library more

i'm not worried about kotlin/native - the only good native gui toolkits are cocoa/ios, javafx, qt, Avalon/Windows

of those kotlin/native has good support for objective-c but obviously mac only is a non starter for what we're discussing here

i'm not so sure mobile is eating the world. imo it's done. tablets are declining and productivity tools all require real desktop OS's

i have this argument with my CTO sometimes. he believes this too. i'm like - dude. ipad is 8 years old now

not much will change in the next two years so then it's 10 years and we're all still working on mac/windows/linux with traditional OS's and traditional widget toolkits (or web)

at any rate, if people start writing pro in house tools for tablets, great, more power to them, but i still like my nice ergonomic and powerful laptop 🙂

java has quite good support for code sandboxing and streaming. sandboxing native code is a lot harder.

it can be done but not on a shoestring budget which is all we'd have for this idea