blog/skills-java17-and-theme-accents/

[giscus[bot]]

blog/skills-java17-and-theme-accents/

Java 17 is the new Initializr default, generated projects ship an AGENTS.md authoring skill that any AI agent can pick up (including a workflow that lets agents drive jdb against the simulator), native themes get a runtime accent palette, plus Metal follow-ups and iOS push that no longer prompts at launch.

https://www.codenameone.com/blog/skills-java17-and-theme-accents/

[jsfan3]

Thanks for this update, Shai.

I have two questions:

1. What is the easiest way to incorporate AI instructions into a recent CN1 project based on Java 17? Is copying AGENTS.md, .agent-skills, and .claude from a new project sufficient? Or is there something else I need to do?

2. The last time I tried building for Windows and macOS desktops, I received an error from the build server. I assume that Java 17 wasn’t yet supported by desktop builds. Is it supported now?

[shai-almog]

1. Yes Make sure to update to the latest version too and copy the tools since some skill instructions expect a particular API shape.
2. Yes. We no longer support UWP and dropped it as a target (although it still works for Java 8). Both Desktop targets in 17 aren't supported at this time. We will probably update them but it's a very delicate process. At the moment the workaround is to use the desktop jar target to build a desktop app.

I think the right fix for desktop targets should be native. Using the iPhone build to generate a Mac native app rather than a Java app. We already support compiling on Linux/Windows with ParparVM but would need to create ports for both. Once the new JavaScript port will be done (it's taking a while to reach parity with the TeaVM port), I will focus some effort on that.

I think it's problematic to keep building on top of Java SE for the desktop due to all the deep baggage and overhead that comes with it. Looking at most desktop development solutions I think there's room to offer something small and fast that can provide a proper alternative to wrapped HTML interfaces.

[jsfan3]

So far, there hasn't been a Linux desktop port. I understand it's for a niche group of users, but many companies now offer desktop solutions for Linux. Here's an RFE that I submitted in 2019: #2835
Thank you for your continued efforts to improve Codename One.

[shai-almog]

I've been using Linux since the 90s with slackware, mandrake and a ton of other distributions. The main issue with Linux is that it's SO hard to get to a decent target. Everything is dynamically linked in a very fragile way, then the GUI toolkit story is a nightmare and packaging is the worst.

When you're shipping a JVM you need to solve all these problems the way Oracle solved them and align there. That's hard on packaging but at least circumvents the other two problems. We already run ParparVM on Linux as part of our CI testing process. That's the easy part. Working with the GUI framework. Compiling with the right glibc and gtk is a bigger challenge. The upside is that packaging can be made much simpler, we can ship a universal exe that is trivial to package.