Why isn't tornado actively maintained?

# tornadofx

[andylamax]

Why isn't tornado actively maintained?

[altavir]

Probably because nobody does maintain it. 2.0 version exist only as a SNAPSHOT for like two years. I believe that there is just not so much industrial interest in desktop development niche. Also JavaFX gradle plugin is not sufficient for painless cross-platform deploy, so it diminishes adpotion as well.

[abhinay]

Are you referring to JavaFX gradle plugin compatibility with TornadoFX or in general?

[altavir]

In general. The problem is that it does not allow to download JavaFX dependencies on-site, meaning you must build a distribution for each platform separately. Also there are problems with transitive dependencies, so I had to drop it and replace it with my own fix.

[abhinay]

Not sure if I completely understand the short-comings. Can you open issues on the github repository? It would definitely help us improve the plugin.

[altavir]

https://github.com/openjfx/javafx-gradle-plugin/issues/5
https://github.com/openjfx/javafx-gradle-plugin/issues/46

[abhinay]

For 5, I think the reason is the default configuration for the dependencies is "implementation". You can change the configuration in the plugin for JavaFX dependencies now. Can you and set the configuration to api : https://github.com/openjfx/javafx-gradle-plugin#4-cross-platform-projects-and-libraries

[abhinay]

Oh, I see that 46 is build on top of configuration only. Let me read through it first.

[altavir]

OK, I just started to write this. For now I use compileOnly for libraries and implementation for the application, but it should be compileOnly always and then add platform artifacts on deploy.

[altavir]

Alse there was some kind of problem with MPP (do not remember which one), so I switched to my own plugin.

[abhinay]

It seems you are looking for a way to distribute your app i.e. create a platform specific package from the plugin itself. Is that right?

[altavir]

On the contrary, I want for plugin to create platform-agnostic distribution with custom start scripts to download platform jars on deploy. Currently, JavaFX is not my focus, I use it only for local testing, so I am content with doing platform-specific binaries. But for a lot of people separate distributions for separate systems is an adoption blocker.

My plugin is here: https://github.com/mipt-npm/scientifik-gradle-tools/blob/dev/src/main/kotlin/ru/mipt/npm/gradle/fx.kt.

[geepawhill]

Is Tornado looking for maintainers? I would be interested.