At the JavaOne technical keynote just now Richard and Jasper introduced the DukePad – a custom built tablet device powered by a Raspberry Pi and featuring a touch screen, camera, HDMI output, GPIO pins, and more. It is powered with Java and has a custom-built JavaFX user interface.
The DukePad is a Do-It-Yourself, make-at-home tablet computer based on the Raspberry PI and JavaSE Embedded 8. The plans and instructions for building the DukePad are available here, and we’re working with suppliers to make available pre-made kits that can be more easily assembled. The software on the DukePad uses Raspbian Linux as the operating system, and an OSGi-based JavaFX environment. Within this DukePad environment, apps are simple JavaFX OSGi Modules.
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The DukePad is not a product, it is an open source, freely available set of plans and software for assembling your own tablet using off the shelf components. As such, the quality of the DukePad software environment is demo-quality (although we did strive to write as much real functionality as we could, the realities of demo presentations requires sacrificing time on parts of the applications that are not going to be shown, in favor of smoothing out those parts that will be shown). The code is hosted in the OpenJFX repositories under apps/experiments/DukePad. We hope to see forks of this code (GitHub, BitBucket, whatever you like best) and lots of experimentation and improvement that can be shared.
Why do you build DukePad? What’s the reason for? We need JavaFX on the existing tablets running Android and iOS.
Why build it? Education, innovation, independence from corporate-driven software, reduction of the price of entry-level computing (we don’t all live in affluent countries), freedom, independence from proprietary software, independence from slave labour, independence from corporate-driven censorship (think Apple), geekiness, desire to explore the intimate details of how computers work, … I could go on. To summaraise: because I want the opposite of an iPad.
Sorry, but you can buy the opposite of an iPad for only 99$, it’s an Android tablet.
So we need JavaFX running on Android! If Oracle and Google does not had this “java battle”, we had JavaFX on Android for a long time…
So for me Rasp.PI and DukePad stuff is nothing else a “filler” until Oracle announces JavaFX for iOS and Android.
@Tobi: Why not?
Because the JavaFX community needs all the time and money to build a ready to use solution for JavaFX on smartphones.
Hi,
does anybody know if there is more information about building a DukePad available. Because the OpenJDK page only shows the used hardware but not how to assemble it.
Ndt