syncany-team team mailing list archive

[Fabrice Rossi <Fabrice.Rossi@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Le 10/12/2013 13:30, Philipp Heckel a écrit :
> I remember Fabrice mentioning that JavaFX is not (yet?) fully open source,
> so that would be an additional con. 

The situation is super unclear. There have been numerous pledge of
Oracle (previously Sun) to open JavaFX and it's clearly partially open.
But the runtime remains currently not open and the future is difficult
to predict in those matters. A very positive aspect is the ability to
run JavaFX code on android and IOS, but it's somewhat mitigated by the
fact that a tablet/phone UI is not a desktop UI (as demonstrated by the
massively failed attempts of Unity and Gnome Shell (look Ma a Troll ;-)).

> [..] 
> - From what I've seen so far, I like SWT a bit better than Swing, but
> that's not a strong opinion and can be easily overridden. What I like about
> SWT is that it actually uses the native components wherever possible while
> Swing draws its own components. For the user, that makes SWT feel more like
> a native application than a Swing application will ever do.

That's also my impression, but note that SWT is based on GTK on linux
and GTK tends to loose momentum currently.

> - Obviously, that also means having to have native libraries with SWT, but
> you wrote that they are not too hard to integrate. Can you elaborate on
> these libraries?
>   + Do we have to ship DLLs/SOs in the final JARs?
>   + If so, can we compile them ourselves or do we have to put them in our
> repo?

As far as I know, you have to ship platform specific binary parts. This
can be a pain.

> - You wrote "fully portable" with Swing? Does that mean "no native
> libraries" or "also on mobile"?
>    If it's the former, see above; if it's the latter, don't we need a
> dedicated GUI for mobile anyway?

Oh yes we do!!!

>> I've not yet started to look at other non-java graphical libraries, and
>> any input on this subject is welcome !
>>
> 
> Let's not make it more complicated than we already have and stick to those
> three (two) options :-)
> Unless someone suggests a Wunderkind, hehe.

Well, what about a more declarative approach to GUI, as in Apache Pivot
(https://pivot.apache.org/)? This is supposedly the cool thing in JavaFX
(the declarative aspect) and it is also quite similar to Android GUI
programming.

> [..]
> - Can you elaborate on the Google Event Bus usage? As I understand, it just
> replaced regular Listener interfaces within a JVM, but it's not for
> communication between GUI and daemon, right?

Under linux, we might want to use dbus. The Java support is not perfect,
but it's a really nice system.

Cheers,

Fabrice