Will JavaFX return to Java?

Friday October 31, 2025. 11:41 PM , from InfoWorld

Just as a proposal to return JavaFX to the Java Development Kit has drawn interest in the OpenJDK community, Oracle too says it wants to make the Java-based rich client application more approachable within the JDK. JavaFX was removed from the JDK with Java 11 more than seven years ago.

An October 29 post by Bruce Haddon on an OpenJDK discussion list argues that the reasons for the separation of JavaFX from the JDK—namely, that JavaFX contributed greatly to the bloat of the JDK, that the separation allowed the JDK and JavaFX to evolve separately, and that the development and maintenance of JavaFX had moved from Oracle to Gluon—are much less applicable today. Haddon notes that JDK bloat has been addressed by modularization, that the JDK and the JavaFX releases have kept in lockstep, and that both Java and JavaFX developments are available in open source (OpenJDK and OpenJFX), so integrating the releases would still permit community involvement and innovation.

“Further, it would be of great convenience to developers not to have to make two installations and then configure their IDEs to access both libraries (not really easy in almost all IDEs, requiring understanding of many otherwise ignorable options of each IDE),” Haddon wrote. “It is both my belief and my recommendation that the time has come for the re-integration of JavaFX (as the preferred GUI feature) with the rest of the JDK.”

In response to an InfoWorld inquiry, Oracle on October 30 released the following statement from Donald Smith, Oracle vice president of Java product management: “Oracle continues to lead and be active in the OpenJFX Project. While we don’t have specific announcements or plans currently, we are investigating options for improving the approachability of JavaFX with the JDK.”

JavaFX was launched in 2007 by Sun Microsystems. It now is billed as an open source, next-generation client application platform for desktop, mobile, and embedded systems built on Java. JavaFX releases for Linux, macOS, and Windows can be downloaded from Gluon.