Lessons Learned in Migrating from Swing to JavaFX

The authors describe a case study of the migration of an interactive diagramming tool written in Java from the Swing Graphical User Interface framework to the more recent JavaFX framework. The study distills the authors’ experience identifying what information was needed to support the migration effort, and how the information was ultimately discovered. The outcome is presented in a set of five lessons about the discrepancies between expectations and reality in the search for information when migrating software between major frameworks.