I'm afraid there's no highly motivating story behind the project, to reduce it to a single word it could be anxiety. I bought a Smart Car Kit from a chinese store and the package takes around 2 months to reach my door so, I needed something to start experiencing with the idea of programming a robot without waiting that much time and then something else came to my mind.
What if I create a piece of software where I can test my navigation algorithms and its behavior in a strictly controlled environment before hitting the real world?
After surfing the web a little bit I found all kinds of alternatives but I thought the best way to spend some free time would be building something from scratch, learn something new and for the first time (because if you see my other repos to date are all excercises or an experimental extension) sharing it to the community, who knows if there is any soul out there that would give a try to this piece of software.
I'm comfortable coding in 2 languages, Java and Javascript. Everytime I think about writing something in javascript I spend a ton of time looking for projects and dependencies for about everything because, you know, js is relly hot and everyone is writing everything with it, which is great but I wanted to jump directly into code.
Since the last time I developed a working graphical desktop application with Java was back at the university I thought this was a great chance to do another one. After googling a little bit I decided to use JavaFX for the UI (as a logical next step to my experience with Swing) and it was really fun to read a couple of days later that Oracle was leaving future efforts for JavaFX completely to the community and separating it from the JDK
Project currently needs Maven and Java 8 to be built and packed. At the moment there are no dependencies but I guess starting from Java 11 we'll need to add JavaFX as a dependency :)
mvn package
java -jar ./target/robotsimulator-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar