Hi Steve, Yes, people say I have the gift of the pitch, when I believe in something I express it and the converse holds true as well. Seriously, I've been happy lately, my company was slowed down by the tides of JavaFX earlier and has an agenda to finish off our software sooner rather than later.
It was "the night before christmas" (JavaOne 2010) while everything was a hush, when I discovered Pivot. So, in the midst of Oracle scattering the bonds and progress made by the JavaFX and other communities like JCP I was happy and wanted to share the fact that there are still positive things going on. Truthfully, the way JavaFX has been managed at the top for the past years is nothing short of a train wreck. The way things went at JavaOne is both good and bad news, it certainly does leave one shaking their head and a whole new meaning to Jimi's song "Purple Haze". Moving on, it looks like Visage is a positive step forward as well and I do wish it every success. At the moment our developers understand Java and XML and then later may have to make adjustments when porting to other platforms like tablets, a universal language or script would of course be ideal. I understand and appreciate the differences in syntax but would it not be a lot of trouble interfacing with toolkits like Pivot? Also, what if JavaFX never arrives? Apologies are not necessary we all want to find our best way forward, Thom On 2010-10-01, at 11:16 PM, Stephen Chin wrote: > Thom, > > I hope you don't take this the wrong way for pointing it out... but your > post came across very sales-ish (from the corporate-looking e-mail name to > the obvious project selling). > > That said I actually have a lot of respect for the Apache Pivot project and I > am reverse sales pitching you with an offer to collaborate on Visage. > <reverse-sales-pitch> > The same benefits that the JavaFX Script language (now Visage) had for JavaFX > can be applied to Apache Pivot as an alternative to the Apache Pivot WTKX > markup language. For example, rather than writing this: > <Window title="Hello WTKX!" maximized="true" > xmlns:wtkx="http://pivot.apache.org/wtkx"; > xmlns="org.apache.pivot.wtk"> > <content> > <Label text="Hello WTKX!" > styles="{font:'Arial bold 24', color:'#ff0000', > horizontalAlignment:'center', verticalAlignment:'center'}"/> > </content> > </Window> > > You could compile this: > Window { > title: "Hello WTKX!" > maximized: true > Label { > text: "Hello WTKX!" > styles: "{font:'Arial bold 24', color:'#ff0000', > horizontalAlignment:'center', verticalAlignment:'center'}" > } > } > (I kept the styles as CSS for consistency even though I consider CSS string > blobs a horrible anti-pattern) > > Some of the advantages of the latter include: > Concise syntax > Ability to intermix code with declaration (no script wrappers needed) > Static compilation with full type checking > Let me know if you are interested in working with us to be a supported Visage > compilation target. Here are our mailing lists. ;-) > http://groups.google.com/group/visage-users > http://groups.google.com/group/visage-dev > </reverse-sales-pitch> > > Apologies to anyone on the cc'ed lists that finds all this cross-project > selling intrusive or distracting (or just doesn't see the irony and humor in > all this). > > Cheers, > --Steve > > On 9/30/2010 3:36 PM, Superstring Media wrote: >> >> Exciting developments are happening at Apache Pivot where we just added SVG >> support this morning via SVGSalamander. Please feel welcome to have a peek >> at what Pivot has to offer as we are also excited about the possibilities of >> working with JavaFX 2.0 as it becomes available. >> >> http://pivot.apache.org/index.html >> http://apache-pivot-users.399431.n3.nabble.com/ >> http://apache-pivot-developers.417237.n3.nabble.com/ >> >> Thom >> >> >> On 2010-09-30, at 1:55 PM, Stephen Chin wrote: >> >>> In case you haven't caught the news from the presentation Dean and I did >>> last week at JavaOne, here is the summary: >>> >>> Our mission hasn't changed... we will continue to provide quality JavaFX >>> add-ons. >>> >>> Going forward we will migrate non-overlapping functionality to the new Java >>> APIs, and will continue to fill new gaps as they are identified. >>> >>> The reality is that we have nothing new to work with at this time, so until >>> Oracle releases a public SDK we are blocked. Hopefully they will be able >>> to do this early and often so we can develop in tandem with the JavaFX 2.0 >>> release. >>> >>> We are not going to do any significant development (other than bugfixes and >>> patch integration) for the current JFXtras 0.7 codeline. It simply doesn't >>> make sense to spend a lot of time writing JavaFX code that will have to be >>> ported in a few months. >>> >>> If you are itching to help out in the meantime, please jump on the new >>> Visage project to keep the JavaFX compiler alive: >>> http://steveonjava.com/accouncing-visage/ >>> http://visage-lang.org/ >>> >>> Cheers, >>> -- >>> --Steve >>> blog: http://steveonjava.com/ >>> >> > > -- > --Steve > blog: http://steveonjava.com/
