Just an update on this: the porting is turning out to be non-trivial. The "upgrade wizard" actually produces C#, not J#, which is fine with me since I know C# but not J#.

Overall, I've started a very targeted port, just doing the classes I absolutely need, and the classes they absolutely need, etc, starting with org.jmol.viewer. I'm working on a NET3d class, parallel to Swing3d and Awt3d, to do .NET specific rendering.

A few problems and my current solutions:
* The "upgrade wizard" does not do a good job with the javax.vecmath classes; it gets over-excited about converting get/set methods to "properties", which have a slightly different api; I have to un-property-ify them by hand. To minimize work, I'm trying to port only the classes that are actually used by Jmol.


* The "upgrade wizard" just gives up on anything related to UI or ImageProducers/ImageConsumers. I'll be adapting a DoubleBufferedPanel colleagues at Brown wrote, to actually hold the rendered images, and using a built in Microsoft Image class. I really hope this gives good enough performance, but it will be a few days before I can tell for sure.

* For a first approximation, I'm not planning to port much of the user interface, since most of what we need is at the API-level. We've got very naive users and we don't need to give them all of the flexibility of real Jmol.

I am concerned that I haven't been able to get it to be a turnkey process. Perhaps as I learn more about the process, I will be able to capture the post-"upgrade wizard" steps in a perl script.

Anything stick out as a bad idea or worrisome here?
-sascha


--- Begin Message ---
Sascha wrote:

> I'm sorry I seemed cavalier about the open source issues.
[snip]

No problem

> Thanks for clarifying the GPL. I didn't quite understand that if I use
> it I have to make the modified source available under the LGPL.

LGPL allows you to use it as a component ... like a library.

But if you want to modify it ... and certainly if you want to use it to
develop a derivitave work ... then the derived work must be made available
under the LGPL.

> The lawyers are all on vacation now, so I'm going to take a few days
> to see if I can get it to work -- if it does, then I'll definitely
> contact the IP lawyers and have them get in touch with you.

OK

> Some issues to consider when we bring the lawyers into the conversation:
>
> * We're planning to use it for students in a Brown organic chemistry
> class, and probably to demo to our sponsors (commercial &
> governmental) and at technical conferences. Does that count as
> distribution?

Yes.

I suspect that the terms of the GNU licenses will be quite familiar to the
legal staff. And I suspect that they will already have a predetermined
disposition towards use and reuse of open source software.

> * I might try some rendering additions-- shadows, particularly. My
> understanding is that I'd have to contribute this back  -- which
> probably means that I should do it in java then port it to J#, so it's
> available in both Jmol and Jmol/J#.

I think that makes sense.

> Shall we move this discussion off the jmol-users list?

Yes. We should move it to [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Miguel



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