I’ve had the honor to introduce DriftFX at todays JavaFX-Days conference in Zürich.

What is DriftFX

DriftFX is a JavaFX extension allowing you to embed native rendering engines (eg OpenGL) into the JavaFX-Scenegraph.

To embed external rendering engines DriftFX exposes a new Node-Type DriftFXSurface one can put at any place in the SceneGraph and treat it like any other JavaFX-Node – you can apply transformations, effects, … on it like you do with any other JavaFX-Node. In general you can think of it as ImageView on steroids.

A more real world example what one can make happen with DriftFX can be seen in this video provide by Netallied a partner company.

What does DriftFX do?

DriftFX allows you to directly embed content rendered by native pipelines into JavaFX WITHOUT going through the Main-Memory. The rendered artifacts stay at the GPU all time!

What DriftFX does not do?

DriftFX is not a rendering engine itself and it does not provide any abstraction layer to write native rendering engines. Its only purpose is to bring your rendered content directly in JavaFX.

What platforms does DriftFX support?

Our Beta implementation currently supports all 3 major Desktop-Systems supported by OpenJFX – Windows, OS-X and Linux.

We currently targeted JavaFX-8 because this is what our customers are running their applications on. We plan to provide support for OpenJFX-11 and future releases of OpenJFX in the week/months to come.

Is DriftFX opensource?

Yes. We’ve been lucky that the sponsors of the work agreed to make DriftFX opensource. Currently there’s an open Pull-Request at Github for the e(fx)clipse project.

Note that it will take some time until the PR is merged. The reason is that we are going to run this through the Eclipse IP-Process to make sure you can safely embed it into your application.

Does DriftFX use internal “APIs”

Yes. It integrates into the JavaFX-Rendering pipeline so it needs to access internals. We are aware that those can change at any time. We are open to contribute DriftFX in future to OpenJFX but it heavily depends on the OpenJFX community and the stewards of OpenJFX.

Is DriftFX production ready?

Propably not 100% yet, we are just about to integrate it into our customers application and fix problems as they arise. So we are somewhere in between Beta and production readiness.

The reason to opensource it now is that we expect the OpenJFX community to take a look and help us improving it. We know that there are many very clever people in the OpenJFX community who can hopefully help us pushing DriftFX forward.

How can you/your company help?

First of all take a look at it and in case it looks interesting get in touch with us to help fund the ongoing work on this matter.

Acknowledgement

First of all I’d like to thank EclipseSource Munich and Netallied for their on going support on DriftFX. Special thank goes out to my co-worker (and partner in crime) Christoph and all other people at BestSolution.at who made DriftFX happen!