JavaFX effects and hardware acceleration… (Take 2)

Note, this entry has been superceeded by Take 3, you can read it for historical context/further explanation, but you should forget its conclusion, JavaFX webstart apps DO NOT require signing to use Direct3D.

Well, there is a reason I call this blog Fumbling Forward.

So, its been an interesting day.  It wasn’t very long after posting my blog entry that I started getting feedback from people, mainly a growing sense of mild alarm related to the answers people were receiving from running the application.

It seemed a far too many people were getting the CPU/SIMD answer when they were expecting Direct3d.

Thus, the investigation began!  First there was the bug I had in my app in the way I was passing GraphicsConfiguration to the effects, but after that was fixed, still no joy.

Well, there was some joy, thos running code locally were getting the right answers, but from the website – nothing.

It turned out the problem was related solely to Webstart versions of Leadfoot.

Stephen Chin (jfxtra’s dude and erstwhile author) eventually tracked the problem down, it seems that Direct 3D is only enabled if you run your application from Webstart as a signed application, and specifically, request the appropriate security permissions.  Stephen has raised defect RT-5193 at javafx-jira.kenai.com

So, you can start the new version which is self signed, and with the appropriate security tags in the JNLP.   Let me know how you go!

Summary

Webstart JavaFX apps require signing and the appropriate <security> tags in your JNLP file. NO, they don’t!