Phillippe,

I assume you intended to send to the pivot-dev@ list.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Philippe Lhoste <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 16:29:09 +0200
Subject: First contact with Pivot
I was embarrassed (should I send this to users or dev ML?) but as some
points are relevant to dev and it seems a more active list, I just
send there.

I just discovered Apache Pivot and found it interesting. I thought I
could give my first impressions (after reading the pages, a bit of the
ML, glancing at the distribution...). I also have a few questions.

Background: I am  an experienced developer, currently living by making
Java code, having contributed to some open source projects (mostly the
Scintilla/SciTE one), learning to use JavaFX.

My first impressions:

- Clean site, with the mandatory screenshot. But where is the license?
(I suppose it is the Apache one, of course... Ah, I see Legal, I was
looking for License! OK).

- Demos: I haven't ran them all yet, but nice, good set of features.
Looks like you took the RIA side from the opposite of JavaFX: they
started with the flashy stuff (pun intended) neglecting the GUI side
(or rather delegating to Swing) while you took great care of the UI,
being less heavy on the scenegraph/graphics effects (although I saw
some are already there). I like the file browser/drag'n'drop side.

- Tutorial on the Wiki. Good list, but alas most pages I visited are
empty placeholders. Maybe you could put a mark beside these, marking
as WiP (work in progress) before we go there.

- JavaDoc: looks like lot is already there. I wonder how the
pivot.collection differs from Java's one? Re-implementation or thin
wrapper? In the first case, why?

I see Greg Brown is omnipresent (lot of wiki pages, SVN commits, some
articles as pointed out in this ML), I suppose he is the original and
main developer? Since there is this ML, I suppose he is not alone...
:-)
I must say I am impressed by the amount of work I see.

I saw Pivot aims at taking a place in the RIA scene, taking the pure
Java way (unlike JavaFX). How does it compare to the latter? And to
Swing? What is the purpose of re-creating what Swing has already done?

I think it is much smaller (binaries) than JavaFX and as I said
currently of slightly different scope. Does Pivot aims to be usable on
JavaME (portable phones?). If so it would explain the duplication of
work with Swing (which isn't available on this platform). If not, the
question remains open? Ease of use? Quick dev?

I am not fan of the XML data description, I would have preferred a
less verbose, more readable/easier to write markup, like Json (I saw
you support it) or Yaml. But well, I can live with that.

I saw some limitations of the text field, as I expected it to behave
more or less like Windows' ones.
I might take a look if I can improve that (if I get involved) but
meanwhile you might be interested by my findings:

- I expected the Home and End keys to bring me to start and end of
field. They seem inactive.
- I expected the Ctrl+Left/Right keys to go from word to word. They
bring to start and end of field!
- Ctrl+V does nothing there... Ctrl+C and Ctrl+X too.
- Double-click on a word doesn't select it.
That's the main issues I found.

Note: the calendars on the demo. The so called English (US) one is
exactly the same as the Français (FR) one on my French computer. Did
you took 'default' instead of 'US'?

That's all for now. See you later.

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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http://www.qi4j.org - New Energy for Java

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