Hi, >> For example, next month probably I'll have to speak of Pivot at a local Java >> User Group (a mail on this will follow), this could be another little >> channel. > > That's great. Let us know if you need any assistance preparing for your > presentation. Ok, thank you very much. I've just started to prepare some point for the slides (an OpenOffice Impress document, and then also a PDF), and I'm thinking to write it in English, so probably some help would be very useful :-) . Then I'd like to put them in Subversion, under a new folder like presentations, demos, etc (under trunk or not, maybe also with some related demo code), tell me if you like this idea. I'd like to (re)use some graphic elements for our new shining site, and link to some material like the articles written by Greg (and some others), and if wanted maybe also some link pointing to the movies published by Todd as demos time ago ... if someone has some idea tell me. The Apache license in this case should be applied the same ? Writing it at start or end ?
And last a crazy idea on this: is someone of other developers is interested (and if I'll have a connection with Internet during the presentation, and I hope yes) you could join me in voice/video conference live ... you like the idea. The conference will be approx at 19:00 local time (GMT +1, Italy) so could not be the best for everyone, but if you like and have time, why not ? Other details will follow next. >> For the SWT port, personally I don't love too much them for many >> reasons (mainly the lack of deploy as Applets, the difficult >> skinnability, poor performances on some platforms, etc). So I'd prefer >> to NOT go to SWT, OR at least if necessary, SPLIT the wtk part (and >> the default skin for what it's possible, or better implement a new >> default skin for SWT) so one implementation for AWT (as currently) and >> maybe another for SWT ... and in the future maybe another for >> Java3D/OpenGL/other ... > > This is a very interesting idea. If we were to render Pivot skins using > OpenGL, we might be able to seamlessly integrate into either an SWT app or an > AWT app without any modifications (assuming that we had an application > context that would allow us to run there). Great, I'm happy you like the idea. > > I don't know enough about OpenGL to know what is realistic. I have a few > questions: > > 1) How well does it handle 2D rendering? While it would be great to support > richer 3D effects, Pivot is still fundamentally a 2D user interface. OTOH, I > believe WPF is backed by Direct3D, and WPF is primarily 2D as well. > > 2) How well does it handle text rendering? Text is the often biggest > bottleneck in layout and paint (especially in a multiline text component like > TextArea). Would OpenGL be able to support this? Take a look at this (a little old) article: http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/10/30/integrating-glpbuffer-and-graphics2d.html > > 3) What is the platform support like? I'm sure it runs fine on Linux and OS > X, but what about Windows? I remember hearing at one point that Windows > didn't natively support it - is that still the case? If so, how difficult is > it to install? How big is the install? Yes, as always Microsoft over years have put non-Microsoft standards as second citizens, but the thing should be that OpenGL are still available but via DirectX or something like this ... > > 4) How well-supported is JOGL? Looks like there are a few other options as > well: >From what I know, JOGL should be the standard way for Java to do this, and if I remember well also JavaFX uses JOGL for doing many things (Googling on this for more info), for example downloading some demo you should seen that also their jars are downloaded, and they need some native code so they need to be signed ... at least until some time ago. I've played also with LWJGL, and its smaller and has less features (but for out requirements should be enough), but it's more oriented to games, and BUT JOGL has been chosen by Sun/Oracle as standard so probably that is the right to use. And last, note that all these features requires a decent driver, and on some not-so-common O.S. for many Graphic Boards this is not an a little thing. Usually with nVidia all works good, on others depends ... . So in my opinion the best should be to have this (in the future, maybe for the 2.0 ?) but not by default, maybe in a skin but having the ability for Pivot to work also without JOGL (maybe splitting a part of a thin Pivot layer in WTK, so having a standard version and an OpenGL version, but I agree that this is not simple). Some info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_OpenGL http://kenai.com/projects/jogl/pages/Home http://download.java.net/media/jogl/demos/www/ Note that probably some features are key to what we need like the render to texture feature. Some interesting articles and demos: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/campbell/archive/2007/01/java_2d_and_jog.html http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/10/30/integrating-glpbuffer-and-graphics2d.html http://java.sun.com/developer/JDCTechTips/2005/tt0208.html http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/09/11/jogl2d.html Tell me what you (all) think on this. Bye, Sandro
