Hi Josh Marinacci, Yes, the toolkit you described below is necessary, where can I see/get Bedrock?
Also, please consider joining forces with Apache Pivot. Pivot is a RIA toolkit in the same vein as Flex/Silverlight. Since I can not afford to wait until 2011 Q3 for JavaFX I have had a close look at Pivot, it is substantial and I am very pleased. It includes a retained scenegraph in addition to immediate Java2D rendering, a powerful declarative script system, a ton of controls, skinning and much more. I really think that Leonardo and Pivot should work together. its time to make the Java UI and RIA space strong (and unified) again! http://leonardosketch.org http://pivot.apache.org/index.html United we stand stronger, Thom On 2010-09-28, at 12:09 PM, Josh Marinacci wrote: > > On Sep 27, 2010, at 12:17 AM, Michael Zucchi wrote: > >> Hi Josh, >> >> On 26 September 2010 23:55, Josh Marinacci <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Hi guys. I'm sorry I haven't been around to answer questions or work on the >>> next release. I've had a lot of travel lately for Palm (all very good >>> stuff), which has kept me pretty busy. On the upside I've had the chance >>> to put Leonardo and it's yet-to-be-named UI toolkit in from of a lot of >>> great people. I'll be back home today and ready to dive back into Leonardo >>> this week. >> >> I'm curious as to why you're writing your own toolkit. After having >> used a few other toolkits (gtk+, wpf, older stuff), swing isn't really >> all that bad. And even if it wasn't that hot it'll still take a hell >> of an effort to get something which is complete enough to write a GUI >> heavy application with. It made some sense for The Gimp to write >> their own toolkit, but the world is very different now and it just >> seems like such a large amount of redundant effort when there is quite >> a lot of other (possibly more interesting) stuff to work on. >> > > That is an excellent question. > > In the short term I started writing a new toolkit because I couldn't get > Swing and JavaFX to do what I wanted for Leonardo. Long term, it's about > freedom. Both technical and legal freedom. We need the technical freedom to > mix graphics with components, mix 2d with 3d, to skin our gui's with proper > CSS, and more. We also need legal freedom. The new JavaFX 2.0 (once released > in a year) actually sounds pretty similar to my plans for this toolkit. The > major difference is that mine is BSD, whereas Oracle's cannot be > redistributed and runs only on Sun's VM. My toolkit (currently called > Bedrock), gives you the freedom to run it anywhere you want, including > bundling it with an alternative JVM like GCJ, Kaffe/Harmony, or Avian. You > could event embed it into a phone. JavaFX, sadly, still does not let you do > this. > > I want to clarify that this toolkit isn't truly new. Everything in it is > straight forward and not innovative. My goal was to take the best ideas of UI > toolkits from the past 20 years and put them into a single library without > any backwards compatibility concerns. The innovation is in the choosing and > bundling, not the core concepts. My goal is for developers to be able to > create desktop apps that look and perform so well that end users will never > know they are written in Java. > > In terms of time to build it, I've done it entirely by myself over the past > few months. It wasn't as hard as I expected, though that partly stems from > having worked on the Swing and JavaFX teams for five years. Once the project > is open I hope to get more contributors to polish it up and push it forward > with new stuff. > > >>> BTW, any feature requests for the next beta? >> >> Having 'delete' as the first and usually-automatically-selected item >> in the context menu isn't too hot, I kept deleting stuff before I >> realised what was even happening. Also the transparency on the popup >> context boxes is too transparent. e.g. you can't read the black >> writing if it opens up over a black object. Same with the red spline >> handlers over a red object. > > Great feedback. Keep it coming. Thanks! > > - j > >> >> Cheers, >> Michael > > Blasting forth in three part harmony! >
