Nicolas de Mauroy

We use MariaDB because it is a free open-source SQL database. I was looking for a low-cost technical stack, and SQL database made a huge sense as it is transactional, and offers all the confort of relational queries, which, for me, is better for general purpose database than noSQL alternatives.

MariaDB is the really free drop-in replacement for mysql, which makes it a good default choice. Note that at some point, I plan to support also Post/gre SQL, which is the other famous SQL open-source database in the enterprise world.

We use JavaFX because it is a powerful framework in java, allowing to develop client and server in the same language.

JavaFX is generally powerful, though there are some components that would require an overhaul to get fully "desktop-grade" experience with simple development (most of the pain is around management of tableview and similar components).

JavaFX is open-source and still supported, even if it could make with a more active improvement of the widgets. Still, the team maintaining it is doing a great job og steering it through the important changes ongoing on the java platform.

We use Java because it is object-oriented, functional, and strongly typed. The strongly-typed requirement is key for performance and also to ease debugging. If it compiles, it should run.

It has also a huge amount of libraries, and is stable (will still be there in 20 years). It is also easy to get java developers in an enterprise context.

The JVM allows to smoothly develop on Windows and run on Linux server. There are perfectly good JVMs that are completely free.

Javafx is actually quite good, and feels modern. Some widgets are quite hard to master though (for example the table view...).

I have written a low-code development framework ( Open Lowcode ) based on Javafx. You may want to have a look if it can help you. It is purely open source.