Interview with Tom Schindl
This time around I have an interview with Tom Schindl, a developer who has been active on the openjfx-dev mailing list teaching the Oracle engineers a thing or two about OSGi, and how to play nice with it. We really value his feedback, and all other feedback we receive from members of the JavaFX community. Enjoy the interview, and if you have any feedback about what Tom is discussing, please feel free to leave comments on this post. I’ll make sure he keeps an eye out and answers any questions you may have :-).
Hi Tom – could you please introduce yourself to everyone?
In my daytime job I’m cofounder and CTO of a small software company named BestSolution.at located in western Austria where we develop solutions for and provide consulting to customers around the world.
We have put our focus in the last years on OSGi and Eclipse technologies and because of this engagement I’ve become a committer on various Eclipse projects including the next generation of the Eclipse Platform named e4 (the foundation of the Eclipse 4.2 SDK) for which I wrote the initial prototype together with an employee from IBM.
You’re a relative newcomer to the JavaFX world, joining around the release of JavaFX 2.0. What drew you into JavaFX?
At the time JavaFX 2.0 got released I was searching since some time already for an alternate UI technology. Because of Eclipse RCP we historically worked and still work in many project with SWT. Like any technology SWT has its advantages and disadvantages. One of major problems is and was that you can’t really style all properties of a control because the widget is not drawn by SWT but the native widgettoolkit and so I was searching for another UI technology which doesn’t have such a limitation.
So JavaFX 2.0 came just at the right time for me and I liked the design of the toolkit including its property and observables API (at Eclipse I’ve been involved in the eclipse databinding library so I know this problem domain a bit) and most importantly the useage of CSS to declaratively styling the UI, interesting enough is that once more at Eclipse we decided to use CSS as well to style the e4 platform.
