Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Andrew Cowie <andrew operationaldynamics com>]

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 18:58 -0400, Ben Maurer wrote:

> We're not proposing Java. ...

No, but one of these days GNOME developers who happen to be working in
Java on will be on the receiving end of the same discussion, so I for
one appreciate the inclusiveness of the conversation.

> Sun is investing by improving 
> Java on the desktop (including by making Swing apps look native in gtk, 

On the other hand, people working on applications in that use java-gnome
are writing programs that *ARE* native in GTK.

It's sort of a shame that through the last few years the bulk of apps
written by people using java-gnome were in-house corporate projects,
rather than generic applications targeted for widespread desktop usage.

But there is a good level of continued interest and a number of public
applications are coming along nicely. Pancake wrote a digital channel
surfer called gDVB. Sean wrote evolution-data-server bindings and tied
his Contacts viewer and vCard parser to it. I'm working on several apps
targetted at small business operations and finance. And oh boy, wait
until the execution analysis tool Frysk hits the big time. Amazing.

So still under most people's radar, but serving a niche that's important
to me: opening the GNOME ecosystem to new contributors.

>

As for Sun's 1.6 efforts, all good, I guess - and something I wish
they'd one circa Java 1.2. Oh well. And meanwhile, the Classpath hackers
have a AWT & Swing implementation with a GTK peer back end which is
getting stronger and stronger, so even people working in Swing (yick)
are getting closer to being able to create a vaguely GNOMEish app. It's
a start. But we made a platform commitment to GNOME a long time ago and
I'm happy working directly in [Java/]GTK. So there we are.

> [multiple simultaneous managed runtime environments]

Is memory consumption and contention between multiple apps all running
in various managed runtimes a concern? Theoretically, yes. As one who
lives it in practice is it actually a problem? Surprisingly, no. But
then, that's always been the point of "the evil of premature
optimization".

AfC
London

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Managing Director
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