[jsword-devel] RCP/SWT

[DM Smith]

Aleksander Rozman wrote:

> Hi !
>
> Sorry to add my opinion so late.

No problem. We are all in this together.

>
> Before doing any serious refactoring of whole project, there should be 
> some things done.
>
> 1. Full working release of project, with everything so far done (for 
> example version 1.0)

Agree. Should happen real soon.

>
> 2. When going in refactoring everything should be moved to new version 
> (2.x) and stating this in all releases. And also creating TAG in CVS 
> release so that old version can be retrieved (why see point 3).

Agree. Also we are going to migrate to SVN just after the release. 
Further, we keep all releases as source and binary tarballs/zips and 
make them available in our downloads section.

>
> 3. SWT is part of Eclipse, and while Eclipse works on most of existing 
> platforms, SWT does not. SWT works 100% on Windows and Linux, but on 
> other platforms it doesn't, at least not all versions and not fully 
> (SWT 1, SWT 2 are little bit older version and since they have been 
> out for long time, they became suported, SWT 3 still has a lot of 
> problems on most of platform). I know this as a fact, since SWT 3.1 
> support (in Eclipse 3.1) in FreeBSD (which I also use beside Win) was 
> added just recently and NOT into Eclipse but as separate entity. I 
> imagoine that the same problems are with Mac and Sun system, and others.

Hmm, not good! I think then that we should probably continue to support 
Swing for the foreseeable future. We try to keep away from the bleeding 
edge in what we support (for example, we still develop with Java 1.4.2)

There is also the problem of older platforms. One of our desires is to 
support missionaries, pastors, Christian schools and the like who run 
old hand-me-down machines. At some point BibleDesktop will outgrow an 
old platform. (For example, my old win 98 laptop with 32M ram and slow 
hard drive runs so slow that I don't like to do anything on it. I 
imagine that BibleDesktop would not be very usable. I have not actually 
tried it.)

>
> Andy