JavaFX is a fairly new language, so I was curious to see if Maven plugins to build JavaFX projects were already available. After considering the FEST JavaFX Plugin and after a failed attempt to get the Plexus Compiler Component for javafxc working, I decided to try out the JFrog JavaFX Compiler Maven Plugin.

According to the site, I wouldn’t have to do much. Under the plugins tag in my pom I would need to add the following:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.jfrog.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>jfrog-javafx-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <goals>
        <goal>compile</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Besides that, I would need to add a reference to the JFrog repository to either my settings.xml file or the project’s pom, in order to download the plugin itself. For this little experiment I decided to just add it to the pom. The instructions said I’d only need a reference to their plugins-releases-local repository, but this wasn’t enough; in order to have access to the JavaFX libraries themselves I also had to add their libs-releases-local repository. I ended up with the following profile:

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>default</id>
    <activation>
      <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
    </activation>
    <repositories>
      <repository>
        <id>jfrog-libs-dist</id>
        <name>jfrog-libs-dist</name>
        <url>http://repo.jfrog.org/artifactory/libs-releases-local</url>
        <snapshots>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
      </repository>
    </repositories>
    <pluginRepositories>
      <pluginRepository>
        <id>jfrog-plugins-dist</id>
        <name>jfrog-plugins-dist</name>
        <url>http://repo.jfrog.org/artifactory/plugins-releases-local</url>
        <snapshots>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
      </pluginRepository>
      <pluginRepository>
        <id>jfrog-libs-dist</id>
        <name>jfrog-libs-dist</name>
        <url>http://repo.jfrog.org/artifactory/libs-releases-local</url>
        <snapshots>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
      </pluginRepository>
    </pluginRepositories>
  </profile>
</profiles>

Finally, in order to compile everything, of course I would also need to add a dependency for the JavaFX runtime. The site explains how to do this for JavaFX 1.1.1, but I wanted to use JavaFX 1.3.0. Since version 1.1.1, the JavaFX runtime has been split up into a bunch of different jars, such as javafx-common, javafx-anim, javafx-ui-desktop, et cetera. Of course you can add a dependency only for those JavaFX jars you actually need, but I was lazy and just added the following:

<dependency>
  <groupId>javafx</groupId>
  <artifactId>all-sdk</artifactId>
  <version>1.3.0</version>
</dependency>

The all-sdk pom contains dependencies of all actual JavaFX 1.3.0 jars, so this will ensure you will be able to use the entirety of JavaFX in your project.

After I did all that, the project built successfully!