Maven 3 + JavaFX 2 + EJB 3.1 + JBoss AS 7. Is this possible?

Question

Good afternoon guys I'm new in the forum, and I'm studying recently JavaFX 2.
My question is: Is it possible to create an application JavaFX 2 and make it available in a JBoss 7 application server?
I'm doing some tests of architecture (a simple login), and this is my structure, I'll need JBoss 7 as server, EJB 3.1 for the business layer and as Maven dependency management. If the JFX not fit this scope, I will need to change the view layer technology.
So what I did do, was the integration of JavaFX 2 with EJB 3.1 (@EJB) and maven, all right here.
The problem is that when I put the module in order to deploy jboss, the following message appears in jboss log:
*"java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: javafx.application.Application"*
The structure consists of:
- a jar with the business logic layer and the model / database access;
- a jar with a client application in JavaFX.
These jars are in the "deployments" from JBoss and when JBoss starts, it creates these jars and provides as modules.
The business jar starts and it becomes available, but the client does not , giving the above message.
Note: The same structure works with JSF 2, the only difference therefrom is that the jar is replaced by a customer client war.
Could someone give me a help or light on this situation?
Perhaps some possible outputs for this situation, I do not know if this is the best practice, but in order to use separate jars, is able to make an application that can be modified in parts, not needing to re-deploy a complete application, every time that a change is made.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Thanks for posting a link to the TreeGrid control you are using, this greatly helps in understanding the context.
Also thank you for the feedback.
The functionality of the TreeGrid is significant and the effort involved in implementing something like that native to JavaFX would be substantial, hence I understand why you want to embed it in a WebView. It amazes me that people go to such effort to build html controls of such complexity.
Evaluating JavaFX performance with TreeGrid is mostly evaluating just the WebView component. rather than JavaFX as whole. WebView is just one part of JavaFX. I assume you know that already and have likely tested other features. Using TreeGrid as a benchmark is reasonable if you need to create JavaFX clients with embedded WebView that renders TreeGrid or similar very rich html components.
I tried running the TreeGrid off the TreeGrid site.
From a few quick tests, most of the generated TreeGrids seemed to work fine.
Startup of the TreeGrid was slow (maybe 10 seconds) before the page rendered vs about 2 seconds in Firefox. Performance of WebView in general is not too bad at the moment and is comparable with the major browsers for most tasks (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10762979/performance-of-webview-in-javafx). There exist some particular operations which obviously bottleneck it sometimes when stressed and I guess TreeGrid uses some of those.
Some functions of the TreeGrid did not work because JavaFX WebView does not natively support them.
Support for these functions should be added at a later stage, for other functions support will likely never be added.
For example,
- some of the combo box options embedded in the TreeView were displayed sequentially rather than in a dropdown as on Firefox.
- the Gannt Chart project schedule did not render (likely because it makes use a bdo tag which is not yet supported).
- tables embedding Adobe Flash and Silverlight components did not render those because WebView does not (and probably won't ever) support those plugins.
- printing of the TreeGrid is not supported (printing is being added to JavaFX in a future release).
- trying to display some tables even generated jvm crashes - which is unfortunate.
Taking all of the above together, really if you app required a TreeGrid, I would agree with you that it would be best not to display it in a WebView as WebView is not quite mature enough to handle it (perhaps in a couple more releases it will be). Instead, what I would do is just use a HostServices.showDocument call to display the TreeGrid in the system web browser and use JavaFX for other parts of the app as appropriate.
http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2/api/javafx/application/HostServices.html#showDocument%28java.lang.String%29
Could be web (war), attach a jar in a web application (shell), is ugly hack.I was just advocating not placing the JavaFX application in a war because it is then deployable against a standard web server or off the file system rather than on a war aware web application server and is because it is easier to describe for troubleshooting because there is one less packaging step to go wrong. But there is nothing stopping you placing the jnlp, html, app jar and dependent jars inside a war and serving the war containing those contents from your java web application server if you wanted to do it that way.
Could be compatible with Maven natively, or at least be less sufferable to implement using Maven.Yeah, quality maven integration support is lacking . . . could definitely be improved with time and effort.
It would be nice to see an independent 3rd party implementation of an open source javafx specific maven plugin, but nobody has yet and the JavaFX deployment team has been too busy implementing other (important) features such as the ant packaging tasks, native packaging support and deployment support across all supported platforms and configurations to undertake this (which is understandable to me).
The JavaFX could have a TreeTable with such features as this Treegrid.Yep, that would also be a good thing . . . could definitely be added with time and effort.
Probably this could be done as a 3rd party control or project like the jgoodies stuff for swing: http://www.jgoodies.com/.
JavaFX has failed the test . . . JavaFX could be a web development language for enterprise software.For some organizations, some application types, some functions and some processes (e.g. organizations which rely solely on Maven, make use of highly complex html apps like TreeGrid or Google HTML Apps, applications which are mainly document based like a news site, applications that require printing/webcam support, organizations where the skill base is solely html and very little java, or only server side java skills and no client side java development, etc) - then a 100% javafx based solution would not be the way to go. However, that does IMO leave a still large (and growing) number of enterprises and enterprise applications which could potentially benefit greatly from JavaFX based technology. It will be interesting to see if other Oracle groups outside the JavaFX team also come to that conclusion.
For further perspective, I highly recommend reading: http://fxexperience.com/2012/06/javafx-the-10000-foot-view/
Sample code I used to run tests on TreeGrid.
import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.web.WebView;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
public class TreeGridView extends Application {
  public static void main(String[] args) { launch(args); }
  @Override public void start(Stage stage) {
    WebView webview = new WebView();
    webview.getEngine().load("http://www.treegrid.com/treegrid/www/");
    stage.setScene(new Scene(webview));
    stage.show();
}