I think it's a great idea. And it sounds like a Pivot 3.0 timeframe.
I'm a little concerned, reading others' replies, about the "impedance
mismatch" that Noel mentioned and Greg's concern about font metrics, but
in general I think this is the "right way" to go (farther) forward. The
key thing for the short-term would be defining the "Pivot SPI" in your
diagram and getting the existing AWT plugged into it, which it sounds
like you are already working on.
So, count me in.
~Roger Whitcomb
On 11/13/11 7:49 PM, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
Gang,
I have been toying around with the idea of abstracting away the AWT
dependency in Pivot, and make that pluggable.
Why would you like to do that?
Well, my secondary target is to make Pivot run on GWT, so that we can have
Pivot applications running on HTML5 Canvas as well as AWT, and potentially
Android...
I think the Pivot+GWT+HTML5Canvas would be a killer feature. No one else
offers a windowing toolkit for HTML5+Java written in Java. Messing with
<div/> and CSS is fine, but not that nice when richer applications are
needed.
So for the GUI part of Pivot, we would end up with something like this;
+--------------------+
| Application |
+--------------------+
+--------------------+
| Pivot API |
+--------------+ |
+------------+ | |
| Pivot Skin | | |
+------------+ +-----+
+--------------------+
| Pivot SPI |
+--------------------+
+-----+ +------------+
| AWT | | GWT |
+-----+ +------------+
+-----+ +------------+
| JVM | | JavaScript |
+-----+ +------------+
+------------+
| HTML5 |
+------------+
+------------+
| Browser |
+------------+
The refactorings needed to make this a reality are quite extensive, and the
GWT implementation is going to take some time as well. But I think it is a
reasonable scope and something that can gather quite a lot of new
contributors, plenty to scratch and revived interest in Pivot. As you
figured, it is not possible to keep compatibility with this change, so it
is fairly clear that the changes don't qualify for 2.1 ;-)
WDYT?
Cheers
