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Where's e(fx)clipse 0.9.0?

So it's been > 6 months that we did an release of e(fx)clipse where is the first version form Eclipse.org

The short answer is

We have an IP-Problem

The long answer is

To make it super easy for our users to develop JavaFX applications we provide what I think is the most powerful JavaFX-CSS-Editor you get today because it knows all JavaFX-CSS properties, their values and format, is context sensitive ... . We've invested a lot of time into a metaformat we named cssext which can be seen as the DTD of a CSS-File where we retrieve the informations from. We did this because Oracle does only provide a handcrafted HTML-Document describing those informations which can not be used by any tool to provide anything meaningful - you are back in the good old days where you have a browser opened next to your IDE to browse the file. Now the problem is that the license of the above document does not allow us to modify, distribute or display any part. How can this problem be solved:

  1. Oracle puts the CSS interface description under a reasonable license
  2. The JavaFX team offered that we contribute the cssext-File to JavaFX
    1. It is published on a Web URL
    2. It is distributed as part of JavaFX

We don't think 2.a and 2.b are viable solutions because 2.a requires you to have web access which sometimes is not available in companies, on the train, ... and 2.b means we are bound to the Java release cycle to push out new features which is not acceptable. We are grateful for the IP-Team at Eclipse to make us aware of this problem, we are frustated because this is a major step back for the e(fx)clipse functionality. Oracle and the Eclipse IP-Team are discussing solutions but it will take another couple of weeks (and then another couple of weeks) until this gets resolved (or not resolved). I was holding back the release because I think the loss of this feature is a major loss for e(fx)clipse but I'm fed up now. It was our best intention to give JavaFX developers a good (Eclipse) IDE experience to make it's adoption more easy but if we are not allowed we can't do anything but drop the ball on it (=the css tooling). So to sum: If you are building applications on top of our runtime modules you are not affected by the above problem, this is only a problem of the JavaFX-CSS Tooling and it sucks!

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