Yes, Chris - I think I was trying to make this point.  I think the
"secret" APIs argument is a red herring of speculation by JG.

 - Joe

On Nov 8, 10:36 am, Chris Adamson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just listening to #329 and I think undue attention is paid to OSX
> "secret APIs" in the context of a hypothetical community port of a Mac
> JDK.
>
> Gosling's 
> bloghttp://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/steve_jobs_comments_on_apple
> complains about secret APIs in graphics rendering, but then goes on to
> say (as Tor points out in this episode) that Java on the Mac uses the
> default Java graphics pipeline, meaning that any platform-specific
> graphics rendering abilities, secret or not, are off the table
> anyways.  This is what Gosling is complaining about in the third graf:
> Oracle's insistence that Apple abandon its anti-aliased rendering
> pipeline, and stay pixel-for-pixel compatible with aliased Windows XP.
>
> Secondly, in the context of #329's discussion, it's not clear why
> secret APIs are even relevant.  The things that an AWT/Swing port
> needs to provide are a known problem, and it is known that these
> things can all be done with public APIs.  After all, SWT does them
> all, and is far more entangled with native widgets than Swing/AWT.
> And since SWT is open source, it should be straightforward to go see
> how they did it. So, I don't buy that secret APIs are necessary for a
> SwingAWT port.
>
> Frankly, I don't think there's a hidden empire of wonderful secret
> APIs in Mac OS X.  If there are, then I'd like to know why iTunes is
> still such a goddamn train-wreck. As most people acknowledge, many
> secret APIs are hacks and kludges that haven't had adequate review and
> aren't fit for third-party use. Also for those secret APIs that are
> found through various means (method swizzing, memory inspection,
> etc.), there's no technical reason on OS X that you can't call them --
> look at the Ars article that Gosling cites and you'll see that the
> problem isn't that Mozilla can't see the secret function that WebKit
> uses (they know it's called WKDisableCGDeferredUpdates), but that the
> licensing implications of calling it are unclear.  Big difference,
> though still a blocker for Mozilla.
>
> One unrelated thing I thought of while mentally composing this note.
> The Mac has two viable graphics APIs: Quartz (aka, Core Graphics), and
> OpenGL.  Quartz is implemented in OpenGL, which provides hardware-
> acceleration for all system graphics (yay).  So a port of Java2D would
> presumably want to use Quartz.  But then I wondered: has anyone
> implemented Java2D in OpenGL?  I thought there was a project doing
> this years ago, but I couldn't remember.  If so, then it might be
> worth investigating if it would be practical for a hypothetical port
> to use that for its Java2D implementation, using NSOpenGLViews all
> over the place and then drawing Java2D->OpenGL into them.
>
> --Chris

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