[jsword-devel] Alkitab Bible Study 0.9 released

[DM Smith]

On Jun 11, 2008, at 12:22 AM, Tonny Kohar wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:32 AM, DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> To really get Java to shine with RTL, you will need to ditch Swing.
>> (BD still uses Swing.) Swing has poor bidi algorithm and rtl
>> rendering. It's handling of joiners in fonts is poor also.
>>
>> Our plan for BD is to use an embedded browser. Ideally it would be  
>> the
>> same on all platforms (e.g. Mozilla's xulRunner or WebKit), but we  
>> may
>> end up with IE for windows, xulRunner for Linux and WebKit for Mac.
>>
>
> This is very interesting approach (xulRunner/WebKit), I also need to
> read and learn about embedded browser stuff.
> By any chance have you tried JDIC embbeded browser component ?
>
> Some link related to JDIC embedded browser
> - https://jdic.dev.java.net/
> - http://javadesktop.org/articles/jdic/

We've tried jdic WebBrowser at least twice. But there were problems:
1) jdic is heavy, not playing well in Swing-land (see: http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/mixing/) 
.. It is possible to get it to work.

2) jdic has only recently (Nov 2006) added support for Mac, but it is  
still Alpha.

3) jdic uses a different browser engine (IE, Mozilla and WebKit)  
requiring testing on all three engines to ensure that BibleDesktop  
works.

4) jdic uses a non-open browser on Windows. This means that if we find  
problems with RTL, there will be little hope to have it fixed or find  
a work-around.

There may have been more. For example, our desire to have it also be a  
Mac experience for 10.3 meant sticking with Java 1.4.2. Now, we need  
to find a Java 5 solution.

A new alternative, I haven't looked at is: JWebPane.

See: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/ixmal/archive/2008/05/introducing_jwe.html

This appears to solve "everything" regarding display of module content.

The other promise of using a true browser is support for JavaScript!  
Hopefully, we can use JavaScript to dig into the JSword libraries on  
the local box.

In Him,
	DM