After my virtual conference talk “Java and JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi” at the “Oracle Groundbreakers APAC Virtual Tour 2020”, I got in touch with some people who were working on JavaFX 3D in the past, and were curious how that would behave on the Raspberry Pi.

Yesterday evening Ubuntu announced the release of Ubuntu 20.10 “Groovy Gorilla” with desktop support for the Raspberry Pi 4 (4 and 8Gb). So I had to get up early this morning for a quick test drive!!!

Today I had the honor to speak at the “Oracle Groundbreakers APAC Virtual Tour 2020” conference. And of course the title of my talk was “Java and JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi”.

The OpenJDK sources are now fully available and developed on GitHub as a result of Project Skara. Thanks to a lot of work done by the community, the full Java development flow has been migrated to GitHub while keeping the repository history. This process has been described on the GitHub blog.

In my book “Getting Started with Java on the Raspberry Pi”, I give more info about IDEs (= Integrated Development Environment) for Java development. My prefered ones are JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VSC).

A topic which comes up from time to time in questions related to Java and the Raspberry Pi, is the support of the 4th version of this board in combination with Pi4J, “the friendly object-oriented I/O API and implementation library for Java programmers to access the full I/O capabilities of the Raspberry Pi “.

A micro SD card is the default way to add an operating system to the Raspberry Pi. But there is an alternative you need to consider if you want to make your system more reliable. SD cards are not super fast and can get corrupted when you are writing a lot to disc.

Thanks to Twitter and LinkedIn I got into contact with several developers who are doing Java stuff on Raspberry Pi and I want to share those projects with you as they can be an inspiration for all of us to get started with Java development on the Raspberry Pi.

For this post I did some experiments with Java 15, reusing the Ubuntu 64bit SD card which was also used for the earlier post “Comparing a REST H2 Spring versus Quarkus application on Raspberry Pi”.

In this article “Java vs Python - Which Programming Language Should Programmer Learn First?” by Javin Paul, you can find a comparison between the two most popular programming languages. Of course, as being a Java-developer myself, it’s not a mystery which I would prefer ;-)