Victor,
Thank you for the compliments. It's interesting to see the development of a multiple approaches, and the strength with which differing views are held.
I've started a blog as a diary of Defoe development and, at the moment, my learning experiences with Java 5.0, especially Typesafe Enums and Generics. If you drop in there from time to time, you can see what I am up to. Have you considered one for FOray?
Peter
Victor Mote wrote:
Peter:
I too wish you the best of luck with Defoe and with whatever your future FOP involvement may be. One of my motivations with the modularization work was to make room for the competing ideas, mostly yours, to share what could be shared. This may help explain my frustration at your opposition to it (I didn't catch on until too late that your deal was all-or-nothing). At any rate, I wish to make it clear that I have high personal regard for you, and I consider it an honor and privilege to have worked with you.
I thought of you a few days ago as I was building (again) a little event system for the FOTree system (in FOray this time). When I built it in FOP head over a year ago, it threw events for end-of-pageSequence and end-of-Document. When I built it on FOray a few days ago, I added an event for end-of-FObj. That way a really eager layout system like yours can grab it and go if it wants to. Its not exactly pull parsing, but it seems like a guy could build his queue from that and do whatever he wants to. That is the theory anyway. It took just a few minutes to implement.
I am knee-deep in modularization (again), and although it will be a while before I get there, I am eager to either prove or disprove my theory about using an interface for the grafting of reference areas. I'll try to keep you posted through fop-dev as (or if) I make any progress.
I certainly wish you great success with Defoe. Barring all of us working together with one mind (which has I think been well-enough tested), what could be better than to have multiple successful open-source implementations?
