On Thu, 2012-08-30 at 16:29 -0500, Gregg Wonderly wrote: > I would not have any intent on splitting the streams. Instead, I'd > like to split the programming model of the distribution so that the > GUI and communications would use Java technologies while the audio > processing layers could use the OS native support as a starting point. > > Practically, we could have a much more friendly admin environment, I > believe, if we could shed the simplicity of QT in favor of more > elaborate UI components.
I don't know if it is just me (And I have not worked on Riv for a while), but EVERY major java application (Possibly except Chrome, I have not used it much) I have ever run across has been a right pain to install, xml infested, massive, slow to start up, and generally slightly crash happy, maybe it just comes with the "Enterprise" label or something..... I mean eclipse, really, come back emacs (or vim) all is forgiven, and a glorified text editor really should not crash! 'Orribles java based installer for their DB is another poster child for awful, and they own the language! Phrases like "Java Technologies" make me more then a little nervous, mostly because they don't tell me anything interesting, imply there is some sort of magic there, and remind me far too much of endless meetings with sales slime. Now as it happens the log playback logic is somewhat too tightly tied to the gui in rivendell, and could very usefully be abstracted into a logplayd process (Or three), but remember that even this is fairly hard realtime if you want the transitions to sound smooth. GC at the wrong time there would be a dead air situation, possibly making the next transition also miss its timing. As for IPC, I personally think that network sockets and shared memory are just fine, whatever language is used. Given how pervasive QT is in Rivendell (QString is **everywhere**), it would amount to a full rewrite to move to a different language, and I for one am not sure I see the point, it is a huge amount of code. Getting it to build on anything Posix that has QT is not that massive a job, and given the assumptions about Posix filesystem semantics inherent in the record while playing functionality it is not clear that a satisfactory Wintel port is a reasonable objective. Rivendells admin environment did, it is true grow somewhat organically, and rdadmin could probably use a bit of a spring clean, but the issues are NOT IMHO ones where more elaborate GUI widgets will help. For whatever its worth, I for one am unconvinced that re writing possibly a quarter million lines or so of C++ in java is in any sense worth the pain, now if the proposal was to do it in Haskell or even Lisp..... Freds call however. Regards, Dan. _______________________________________________ Rivendell-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rivendellaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
