On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Vineet Sinha <[email protected]> wrote:

> Zhou,
> I have been spending a significant amount of effort in moving a couple
> of Eclipse based apps to the web. Our current progress has been on the
> Flex side but seeing the Lombardi Blueprint demo we have become more
> serious about pure HTML apps. From that perspective, it is great to
> see more work in this area - and perhaps even making j2s have a home
> at Eclipse.
>

I agree with "pure HTML" apps. Later developments such as <canvas>, HTML5,
and WebSockets have been reinforcing this.

On the desktop side, technologies such as Appcelerator Titanium Desktop can
bring "pure HTML" apps to the desktop just like AIR does for Adobe
technologies. (forgive me for mentioning them) Although they can be
considered competitors to Eclipse RCP, the underlying technology is
different.

Underlies every Eclipse RCP/RAP technology is the Equinox OSGi platform and
Eclipse API, which I think is the strength in Eclipse.

Conforming this to both the web (SWT/BE) & desktop scenario, I can see a
particular scenario:
On desktop: Equinox "running in background" + SWT browser + SWT widgets
rendered by SWT/BE
On web: Eclipse in web server  + web browser & SWT/BE in client (Eclipse RAP
model)

It has a hard dependency on the platform-specific browser, in desktop
scenario. Potentially WebKit can also be integrated to have
"platform-agnostic" rendering engine.


> Most of the current work at Eclipse seems to be using GWT for the Java
> to Javascript compiler. Do you see any way of merging the work, or
> will developers have to give up GWT for benefiting from j2s? And what
> are the benefits of j2s over GWT?
>

I didn't realize that GWT compiler "standalone" is usable. Can you give more
information about this? From what I read on the net, GWT compiler generates
obfuscated code, and even if the obfuscation is disabled, the generated
JavaScripts are pretty much unusable from the developer standpoint. (i.e. it
was built to be used by GWT internals)


>
> >From my experience with the Flex work - there are a couple of
> challenges in bringing an already written Java app: the first is in
> having a compiler and the second is in having the libraries ported.
> Even though the flex work had its own compiler it benefitted from
> GWT's implementations for some of the JRE libraries. Perhaps the best
> solution might be to use the GWT compiler and j2s's libraries for swt
> - does this sound possible? Would it be hard?


It would be desirable if this is possible. That relieves Zhou from doing
redundant work that Google's doing (and will continue to do in foreseeable
future, I suppose) and can contribute more on e4, SWT/BE, and related
projects that can benefit him and Eclipse community at large including
myself. :-)


-- 
Best regards,
Hendy Irawan
http://www.hendyirawan.com/ :: [email protected]
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