Changes and Future Plans for Glossitope

[Joshua Marinacci]

Greetings Glossitope developers! How have you been?

First, an apology for being unresponsive for so long. It's always
like this every summer after JavaOne, as we all work feverishly to
prepare for the conference then crash for a month. Combined with
working hard to get NetBeans M10 out the door I have had no extra
time to work on it. Then my macbook died three weeks ago and has been
in and out of the shop in search of repair (Apple has now agreed to
replace it for free. sweet!). So in short, I apologize for being
busy and here's why. But now it's time to get back to work and to
get Glossitope back on track.

So here are the big changes coming up followed by a roadmap:

* I want to get this one out of the way immediately. The license for
the core engine is now GPL + SCA (Sun Contributor Agreement) instead
of just plain GPL. Note that this does not affect the sample widgets
or your own widgets, only the runtime itself. All this means is that
if you want to have commit access to the source of the engine you
will need to sign and fax/scan/email me a copy of the SCA with your
signature on it. This is the same document that contributors to the
various SwingLabs projects sign. We are doing this because it will
enable us to integrate the Glossitope engine with other Sun projects.
In particular, I am working with Paul Byrne to let our widgets run
inside of the 3D Project Looking Glass environment. If you don't
hack on the core engine source code this change won't affect you at
all. You can also send me patches without worrying about the SCA.

* I am moving the code for the core engine from the 'desklets'
project to the 'desklets-core' project. This means we can give more
developers fast access to the less risky parts of the code (the
widgets) without having to deal with access rights and faxing in
documents. Anything that lets people hack on the code faster is a
good thing! :)

== THE BIG CHANGE ==

* I am disabling the buffered desktop mode. We are going back to the
JDesktopPane version. It makes me sad but alas we have no choice
right now. The buffered mode simply breaks too many things. I had
hoped to build a complete virtualization of Swing so that we could
reliably do the kinds of fancy effects that you saw in JavaOne demo.
Alas it simply won't work in the long run without changes to Swing
itself. I've been hacking on it for two months with almost no
progress. Swing and AWT have too many built in assumptions about
having access to the screen. I could continue to hack on this for
months to come and maybe come to a half way solution, but Cooper and
I have decided that a reliable widget system is more important than a
few fancy effects. There are other projects starting up to try to
virtualize Swing and AWT (in the OpenJDK Project) so one day I hope
to run Glossitope in buffered mode again. But until then we've got
work to do on making a quality piece of consumer software without the
glitz.

== THE OTHER BIG CHANGE ==

* We are going to run on Java 5. YES, IT'S TRUE. JAVA 5. I still
prefer to be Java-6-only since that is the future, but it has become
clear that there probably won't ever be a final release of Java 6 on
Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger). So rather than limit Mac usage to a version of
the OS that hasn't even been released yet, I've decided to back port
it to Java 5. I have always said we would be Java 6 only but we don't
actually use many Java 6 specific APIs. The backport shouldn't be too
hard and Java 6 features can still be used when available (like
better graphics acceleration).

* We are focusing entirely on the JDesktopPane mode. This means I'm
going to port the shaped window / D&D code to this mode as well as
get the graphics sped up.

* We are going to upgrade the security model. In the future you will
be able to pre-request access to things you know you will need; such
as opening a socket to a particular URL. The user will also be able
to see exactly what has been pre-requested in a clear an easy to
understand screen. In most cases the user will never see the runtime
authorization dialog anymore.

* I am not working on the core widgets anymore. There is so much to
do on the engine that I simply won't have time. I'm asking you in the
community to work on them. The standard widgets are under a BSD
license so anyone can work on them without signing anything. And if
you have a completely new implementation that's way better than the
standard widget, then please submit it. We want the best we can get.

So that's it for big changes. The roadmap looks roughly like this
(though it's certainly up for debate).

* Ship a new release with the buffered mode disabled, the source code
moved, and supporting Java 5
* Implement shaped windows in desktop mode
* Implement new security model
* Implement support for Pack200 to streamline downloads.
* Rebuild the core engine JNLP to slim down the first time launch
download.

I think that's every thing. As always, this is a community effort so
I want community feedback.

Thanks,
Josh

[James Williams]

Thanks for the update. I recently went to my first tech conf where I
was presenting so I can sympathize with the need to crash. NetBeans 6
looks awesome btw.

[Patrick Wright]

Hey Josh

Re:

Buffered mode: +1, I think your demos were great but prefer
reliability and stability over glitz. Plus, more important to focus on
functionality (*functional* widgets) than "merely" good-looking ones

Java 5: +1, I just got a MBP

Thanks for the update
Patrick

[Ivan Li]

Hi, Josh
as you say, Glossitope will support JavaFX, but I don't think it
support JavaFX now! do you have any plan to make engine support
javaFX?

[Emmanuel Okyere]

Josh:

Good stuff; (on mbp, so) +1 Java 5

Cheers,
Emmanuel