On June 13, Kevin Rushforth proposed a milestone schedule for JavaFX 11 that would lead to a release on September 18. That date has finally arrived, and right on schedule we at Gluon are very happy and proud to announce that JavaFX 11 is available.
The most exciting aspect of JavaFX 11 is that it is the first release as a standalone set of modules. The fact that the OpenJFX community managed to get JavaFX 11 ready in time is extremely encouraging. The transition from OpenJFX towards a more community-driven project is also going very well.
If you want to know more about the JavaFX 11 release, you are encouraged to visit the brand new community website. Starting with JavaFX 11, Gluon is also offering long term support contracts for organizations that require certainty around their JavaFX development.
The short summary is that JavaFX 11 is a major release. The JavaFX modules, including platform-specific native libraries for hardware acceleration, are available as part of a JavaFX SDK, or they can be downloaded using popular build tools (Maven / Gradle) from Maven Central and other repositories. JavaFX 11 also contains a number of enhancements and bug fixes.
Gluon are very pleased to see how many different developers and companies contributed to this release. Clearly, Oracle is still a very important and valuable contributor, but for the first time, developers from Gluon and other companies took on a huge part of the work as well. The increase in traffic on the OpenJFX mailing list is a clear indication that the interest in OpenJFX is really growing.
Today, we want to thank all the people who contributed to JavaFX 11. We want to encourage them to continue working on JavaFX 12, and we hope many others will join the growing crowd of OpenJFX contributors.