Hi Josh, I'll second that. You have done some great stuff. The Pivot community would undoubtedly benefit much from your involvement. :-)
Greg On Sep 28, 2010, at 1:56 PM, Superstring Media wrote: > 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! >> >
