[jsword-devel] Future Direction for BibleDesktop

[Tonny Kohar]

Hi,

>>> At one point I updated JSword, Common, Bible Desktop, ... fully to Java
>>> 1.5. I found that there was no performance improvement. The features of Java
>>> 1.5 were syntactic sugar that slightly improved code quality. (It did spot
>>> some bugs!) If I had replace StringBuffer, I might have seen some.
>>
>> JRE 1.5 and 1.6 have been proven faster than previous implementations,
>> however simply moving to an updated JRE oviously doesn't mean noticeable
>> speed improvements. The whole issue of moving to a newer platform is not
>> specifically an issue of performance anyway. Sure, there are tons of
>> syntactic sugar in 1.5 and newer, but I see three main benefits. First you
>> can take advantage of new JRE features such as the concurrency utils and
>> other powerful enhancements. Second, development is theoretically made
>> faster/easier/safer via the syntactic sugar you refer to (ie. Generics).
>> Third, I am certainly not opposed to running outdated JREs and realize many
>> companies across the globe are stuck on 1.4, however going out of our way to
>> obtain and develop to an outdated platform doesn't make sense from a
>> modernization and usability perspective. I like your idea of keeping the
>> current version once it has bookmarks, then lets move along into the current
>> century with the main trunk of development using 1.5 or 1.6.
>

For Java 6 is really *feel faster, due to many swing/awt/graphics enhancement.
*feel means, underlying code may/may not be faster (but I hear the
underlying code is optimized as well), but the perception is really
feel faster, eg: sun bug fixes for infamous java grey rectangle during
screen painting/update make things feel faster.

For Java 5 there are not much improvement on performance, but it
toward improving the language eg: annotation, generic, etc and it
become the base foundation for java to move into the future eg: java
6, and java 7 (in progress)

> BTW, AlKitab has the plugin model and a flexible layout. It largely
> replicates the BibleDesktop interface. When we start the 2.0 effort, we
> should evaluate whether it is the appropriate starting point.

Yes alkitab is replicating BD interfaces as close as possible, because
at the moment I feel BD interface is very intuitive and when it is
intuitive why change it. Alkitab only add few things that resemble
modern application eg: docking panel, layout, plugins, etc, but the
main UI is following BD closely. The other things is to achieve that
modern looking application, I am not hesitate to use the latest Java
(this is where the project goal differ with BD), although at the
moment alkitab could run under Java 5 or higher.

Here is a review for Alkitab http://www.fostertribe.org/reviews/alkitab.html
If you look at the review closely, the main point is the UI which is
BD's UI, so BD UI is really great :)

Regarding BD new direction (ver 2), if you are going to stick with
Swing, Netbeans Platform is very good RCP, easy to use and provide a
lot of things eg: docking, layout, plugins, etc out of the box.

And the upcoming Netbeans 7 release will have cool Mac OSX look and
feel, please look at the screenshot at
http://blogs.sun.com/stan/entry/another_reason_for_switching_to

Cheers
Tonny Kohar
--
Alkitab Bible Study
imagine, design, create ...
http://www.kiyut.com/products/alkitab/index.html