Griffon: a desktop application development platform for the JVM | Hacker News Reader

Griffon: a desktop application development platform for the JVM

griffon-framework.org

65 pointsgjvc7 comments

This project seems to be abandoned or at least dormant (last tweet from november 2019) but to anyone looking at cross platform JVM-based desktop apps check out JavaFX with OpenJFX and a recent JDK version. You can use any JVM language with it (Java 14, Kotlin, Clojure, Scala etc).

The split from JavaFX inside the JDK to OpenJFX outside of the JDK was a bit messy so a new project takes some time to setup with Maven or Gradle but aside from that it's still a nice environment to make desktop apps in.

> The split from JavaFX inside the JDK to OpenJFX outside of the JDK was a bit messy so a new project takes some time to setup with Maven or Gradle...

That's not necessarily true, you can obtain many JDK distributions that still include JavaFX.

For example, here's the Azul distributions with JavaFX: https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu-community/?architecture=...

BellSoft also has a LibericaFX distribution: https://bell-sw.com/pages/supported-configurations/

If you want to easily install and switch between these and other standard JDKs easily from the command line, check out SDKMAN! (https://sdkman.io/). It supports Azul's and BellSoft's distributions with JavaFX, as well as other distributions from GraalVM, java.net, Amazon and AdoptOpenJDK.

There may be few tweets but development still continues, on the road to version 3.0.0. The source repository continues to have activity.

Changes include: - support of Java's modular system (JPMS) which requires elimination of split packages, besides providing module descriptors. - take advantage of lambdas where possible.

Is modern Griffon usable with Clojure? There’s ancient talk of it being supported via a plugin, but that seems to be before a big re-write and I can’t find mentions of Clojure in the documentation since.

To my knowledge there have been no official efforts to support Clojure so far. Griffon 2.x requires the use of specific class types (Controller, Model, View, etc) plus the use of annotation processors make life easier (although not strictly required). These could make your Clojure code look less idiomatic and more Java-ish.

However there was an experimental branch of 2.x with Frege support, which means Clojure is certainly doable.

Latest release from May 2018. All builds in Git repo are failing. The project seems abandoned.

Latest release is 2.15.1 (stable). Current development (3.x) is still in flux with big internal changes hence the breakages. I decided to post the changes to let people know what's coming even if that meant breaking builds from time to time.

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