[sword-devel] BPBible 0.5 released

[Jonathan Morgan]

Hi Greg,

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:11 PM, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com>wrote:

> Jon,
>
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi Greg,
> >
> > On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 9:53 PM, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Jonathan,
> >>
> >> Just so I keep track in my brain, in versions <0.5 you had wxHTML as
> >> your rendering engine, yes? And what are you upgrading to now?
> >
> >
> > You are correct that the old rendering engine was wxHTML.
> > The new one is XULRunner (at the moment, XR 1.9.2 - approx FF 3.6,
> though I
> > hope that newer versions will be able to be used without too much
> trouble).
>
> Uh-oh. Newer versions might be usable without much trouble - if they
> are ever released! Mozilla declared some months back they have no
> intention of continuing to release an embedable version of Gecko at
> all. That's one of the major reasons that Xiphos just completed moving
> from Xul to WebKit! There is a wx edition of WebKit, made by a guy who
> had started with a wx embedding of Gecko before that was given up as
> futile.
>

Thanks for the warning, but I couldn't quite develop this on and off for a
year and a half without being a little aware of XULRunner issues, including
the whole embedding nightmare.  To be fair, the old way of embedding
XULRunner in wxWidgets was pretty much dead years ago, whereas the
embedding solution we use is relatively new and still both maintained (sort
of) and able to be maintained by third parties (e.g. me).

If Gecko/Xul ceases being good enough for you or stops updating, that
> might be a direction worth considering in the future. It's been
> underway for quite some time, but I have no idea how mature it has
> ever become. It was originally started by one of the main wxHTML
> developers who saw that wxHTML was woefully inadequate.
>

When looking for a replacement, wxWebKit was the first thing I tried.  It
had a vast number of things with it that I thought unacceptable (the one
that comes strongest to mind was that hovering over a link would not change
the cursor from a pointer to a hand), and I couldn't understand the code
enough to try to fix it (whereas I have made many fixes and enchancements
to wxWebConnect).

Three months ago when running into more XULRunner problems that were
annoying me (some of which I was only able to mitigate rather than fix).  I
tried wxWebKit again, and again concluded that it was not a solution (apart
from anything else, it would hang and segfault too often in odd ways,
including on Acid2 and Acid3.  It also ended up very much slower than any
other WebKit browser I have used).  I am not in principle opposed to using
it, but in practice I have never found it reliable enough or performant
enough to fit the bill, and I gather that WebKit itself changes fast enough
that this is unlikely to change.

Thanks,
Jon

>
> > Jon
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> --Greg
> >>
> >> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:01 AM, Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com
> >
> >> wrote:
> >> > Hi all,
> >> >
> >> > I have just released BPBible 0.5.  This is the first full version
> using
> >> > a
> >> > new rendering engine. Important additions include continuous
> scrolling,
> >> > better support for languages with a Right to Left script such as
> Hebrew,
> >> > and
> >> > many other improvements.  It has not changed from BPBible 0.5 Beta
> 6.  A
> >> > more detailed list of changes can be found at
> >> > http://bpbible.com/news/bpbible-0.5-changes.
> >> >
> >> > Jon
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
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