[jsword-devel] BibleDesktop in SWT

[DM Smith]

It is looking more and more like we will use the RCP and not just 
SWT/JFace.

Right now the license issue is our open question. We also have to look 
at the download size. Over time we have reduced the download size from 
nearly 10 meg to almost small enough for a floppy. This will certainly 
make it bigger. By some accounts it may be 5.5M bigger.

At first we were looking for a way to provide a better HTML renderer 
than what Swing provides. After evaluating the different options (jrex, 
jdic and the like) against our platform and program requirements, we 
found that SWT provided everything we needed and was easy to work with.

In looking at what we have planned for BibleDesktop after our 1.0 
release (which should be soon. The coding is done, and we are working on 
installers), we realized that a lot of what we want to do is already 
done in Eclipse, which we have become familiar, because we develop 
BibleDesktop/JSword in it.

Specifically, it provides a framework for user preferences (which are 
more complete than what BD has), for saving program state (which BD 
lacks) and for allowing the user to arrange the BibleDesktop's desktop 
as they wish (which we don't do). The latter would allow for different 
kinds of users to have different kinds of desktops. For example, some 
may want to use BD for a daily reader and they don't need or want 
everything else that is currently present.

In His Service,
    DM

Mete Kural wrote:

> Are you planning on building the new version of BibleDesktop based on 
> the Eclipse Rich Client Platform? http://eclipse.org/rcp/
>  
> I think that would be a great idea. I know that IBM built the new 
> version of Lotus Notes based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, 
> which is a very complicated client application. If that can be done, 
> BibleDesktop should be efficiently built on top of the Eclipse Rich 
> Client Platform also.
>  
> Thanks,
> Mete
>
> */DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com>/* wrote:
>
>     Another difference is the license. SWT uses EPL (Eclipse Public
>     License,
>     see http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html for details).
>     I think this raises the question of how compatible is it with the
>     GPL.
>     The EPL seems to allow us to distribute a program under the GPL,
>     but does not allow for GPL to be viral. Since GPL is viral, it
>     does not
>     look like we can freely mix the two of them.
>
>     The Apache License has a similar bent (which is what Lucene is
>     licensed
>     under), but we use it purely as an API to a separate set of services.
>     So our code is not a derived work of Lucene.
>
>     The SWT does not provide such a clean separation in our code. We
>     will be
>     blending SWT and our code in a significant manner. So our
>     work will clearly be a derived work of SWT and GPL.
>
>     Any input? Can we go with SWT and if so how? (Let's go for Light
>     and not
>     fo! r Heat :)
>
>     DM Smith wrote:
>
>     > I am reading a book on SWT to see where the differences between
>     it and
>     > Swing are.
>     > I'm not interested so much in the how, but the what. I expect
>     that SWT
>     > has a different way
>     > of doing the same thing. Specifically, I want to figure out what
>     SWT
>     > does not do that Swing
>     > does that we care about.
>     >
>     > The first that I found is that SWT uses the class Decorations to do
>     > something like MDI (JInternalFrame)
>     > but according to the book, on resize (split pane or window) the
>     > internal windows are layed out
>     > all over again with their original positions and sizes. I think
>     that
>     > this is unacceptable.
>     >
>     > Personally, I find that MDI is only of value to look at passages
>     > side-by-side. If that is its only value
>     > then I think that we can figure out how to provide that feature a
>     > different way (e.g. parallel tab sets).
>     >!
>     > Any other thoughts?
>
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