> * full screen video games
> We would like to let people use Swing components as the heads up
> display in full screen video games. This means running in an environment
> where there is no windowing system at all. This would also be useful
> for kiosks and other semi-embedded environments.
You can do that right now, Swing works (mostly) fine in fullscreen
mode.
Thanks,
Dmitri
Joshua Marinacci wrote:
I'm not sure who exactly would want to sponsor this project and which
teams would be involved. Since AWT, 2D, and Swing are so closely related
they would likely all be involved. I can speak, however, to the
practical need for this project. There are many use cases for a
completely virtualized toolkit.
* www.glossitope.org <http://www.glossitope.org>
This is a project I started which lets you write widgets that run on
your desktop in Java. The version I prepared for JavaOne has lots of
cool effects that involve scaling, shearing, and otherwise animating the
widgets in weird ways. Since the widgets are just Swing panels I draw
them into buffered images and then blit those to the screen. This has
lots of odd problems that are hard to fix properly, such as dealing with
focus, handling combobox popups, and keyboard events. These problems
are difficult (if not impossible) to solve outside of core.
* Project Looking Glass
Paul Byrne and I have discussed this extensively and he even had
another researcher start building a headless AWT that could be projected
into the Java3D scene graph. They got pretty far but ran into a few
places where AWT assumes it has a real windowing system with access to
X11 window handles. These are also impossible to fix without changes to
core. Solveing this would let them put Swing applications directly into
the 3d environment
* JOGL Minimal Scene Graph
Ken Russell and others would like to project Swing components directly
into the JOGL scene graph that they are building. This would let you
have a Swing panel that appears normal but can then slide into the
background to be replaced by other panel.
* full screen video games
We would like to let people use Swing components as the heads up
display in full screen video games. This means running in an environment
where there is no windowing system at all. This would also be useful
for kiosks and other semi-embedded environments.
So you can see, there is a great need for a virtualized Toolkit. I think
that most of the work could be done at the AWT level (and hopefully let
me scrap most of my Swing level hacks) but undoubtedly it will affect
many areas in core. This is something that is vitally needed to let us
take Java SE into new environments.
thx,
Josh
Allow me to clarify, as well, that the purpose of this project
is experimental and for prototyping. Think of this as a KSL [2]
style Project that should be associated with the appropriate
Group (i.e. 2D or AWT). Obviously such a Project, if approved, would
need a VCS "sandbox" as described in [1]: "Projects that are not
tightly related to the development of JDK 7 will, for now, also be
given a regular java.net project within the java.net OpenJDK Community."
Can we get a Group sponsor?
I don't think we have a clue what sponsorship means. It certainly
can't mean in this case any
work from Sun engineers ( wish we had time for such ideas ourselves),
or taking it back into openjdk
in any time in the forseeable future.
It just seems like an interesting expt this time, with unproven
practical applications.
- Blasting forth in three part harmony!
