On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Vineet Sinha
<vineet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Zhou,
I have been spending a significant amount of effort in moving a couple
of Eclipse based apps to the web. Our current progress has been on the
Flex side but seeing the Lombardi Blueprint demo we have become more
serious about pure HTML apps. From that perspective, it is great to
see more work in this area - and perhaps even making j2s have a home
at Eclipse.
I agree with "pure HTML" apps. Later developments such as <canvas>, HTML5, and WebSockets have been reinforcing this.
On the desktop side, technologies such as Appcelerator Titanium Desktop can bring "pure HTML" apps to the desktop just like AIR does for Adobe technologies. (forgive me for mentioning them) Although they can be considered competitors to Eclipse RCP, the underlying technology is different.
Underlies every Eclipse RCP/RAP technology is the Equinox OSGi platform and Eclipse API, which I think is the strength in Eclipse.
Conforming this to both the web (SWT/BE) & desktop scenario, I can see a particular scenario:
On desktop: Equinox "running in background" + SWT browser + SWT widgets rendered by SWT/BE
On web: Eclipse in web server + web browser & SWT/BE in client (Eclipse RAP model)
It has a hard dependency on the platform-specific browser, in desktop scenario. Potentially WebKit can also be integrated to have "platform-agnostic" rendering engine.
Most of the current work at Eclipse seems to be using GWT for the Java
to _javascript_ compiler. Do you see any way of merging the work, or
will developers have to give up GWT for benefiting from j2s? And what
are the benefits of j2s over GWT?
I didn't realize that GWT compiler "standalone" is usable. Can you give more information about this? From what I read on the net, GWT compiler generates obfuscated code, and even if the obfuscation is disabled, the generated _javascript_s are pretty much unusable from the developer standpoint. (i.e. it was built to be used by GWT internals)
>From my experience with the Flex work - there are a couple of
challenges in bringing an already written Java app: the first is in
having a compiler and the second is in having the libraries ported.
Even though the flex work had its own compiler it benefitted from
GWT's implementations for some of the JRE libraries. Perhaps the best
solution might be to use the GWT compiler and j2s's libraries for swt
- does this sound possible? Would it be hard?
It would be desirable if this is possible. That relieves Zhou from doing redundant work that Google's doing (and will continue to do in foreseeable future, I suppose) and can contribute more on e4, SWT/BE, and related projects that can benefit him and Eclipse community at large including myself. :-)
