Hi Kirill,
Kirill Grouchnikov wrote on 11/29/2009 07:51:40 PM:
> In any case, it is quite unlikely that Trident will be contributed
> to e4. It is a general purpose animation library that does not
> target SWT specifically. It has special built in support for UI
> toolkits, with out of the box support for Swing, SWT and most
> recently Android. If there's anything missing to support SWT, i'm
> happy to add it, but the way i see it Trident is a third-party
> dependency jar in e4. Otherwise it's just maintaining two separate
> versions of the same library in two separate places.
I finally had a chance to look at Trident. I think it looks promising and
could be the way for us to get animation support in e4. If moving the
project to eclipse.org is not an option, then as you say, we'll have to
consume it as a third-party library. This does mean that we'll have to go
through the Eclipse IP review for any new version of Trident, but that's
just how it is.
Would you be willing to make Trident easier to consume for us? Ideally,
this would mean packaging it as an OSGi bundle (this really just means
adding a bunch of headers in the manifest file), but also splitting it into
parts so that we could use just the core and the SWT part, but not the
Swing or Android support. Also, I am wondering if your current architecture
for configuring which toolkits are supported could be changed to make it
more explicit? What would be wrong with removing the declarative
configuration mechanism (trident-plugin.properties) and instead requiring
clients to instantiate the kind of timeline they want? E.g. write "Timeline
rolloverTimeline = new SWTTimeline(button);" instead of "Timeline
rolloverTimeline = new Timeline(button);"?
Finally, this is just providing us with a mechanism for implementing
animations. The next question is if there is anybody who can sign up for
starting to use this in one of our demos, collecting use cases, and working
on the problem of how best to expose this to clients. For example, would it
make sense to put animation support into the CSS styling engine, analog to
how you can declare animations in HTML 5?
To summarize, I am looking for:
- Feedback from others re: can we go ahead and use Trident as the
animation library in e4?
- A response from Kirill how much he would be willing to help us consume
Trident in e4?
- Someone who can drive this whole topic forward on the e4 side, because
here at IBM Ottawa, we have enough on our plates already. I'm ready to
start a new committer election... ;-),
Boris
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