October 31, 2012 
When creating RCP applications using SWT the product-Export allows you to create a native launcher artifact. The problem with this native artifact is that on OS-X this native launcher and JavaFX don’t like each other.
JavaFX is all about a nice user experience, so not having a native launcher is a problem for people building applications on top of the technologies provided by our e(fx)clipse project.
The real problem although is that if you want to get into e.g. the mac appstore you need to ship a native installer – for mac a dmg – which includes everything you need to run (including the JRE!).
The conclusion of those 2 points above is: We need to fix this
For none OSGi-JavaFX application Oracle ships a small utility to create:
- A native launcher experience
- A native installer for your target platform
Today I took a stab on it and finally managed to package up my FX-IDE using the fxpackager using a combination of maven-tycho and ant.
I’ve pushed the build stuff to the fx-ides github-repo. The useage of the fxpackager can be seen in the build.xml file.
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[...] Tom Schindl has two posts out this week. Firstly, he posted three videos on the following topics: e4 on JavaFX, creating a JavaFX IDE, and creating a JavaFX desktop. Secondly, he posted about fxpackager for JavaFX OSGi applications. [...]
[...] can see this in action in an older blog post. You as a tooling user might not care about this but we’ve developed a small DSL allowing one [...]