The java-gnome language bindings project

Hi Mark--

On Sep 30, 2004, at 2:00 PM, Mark Howard wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I've been thinking a lot about java-gnome today.
> Questions like:
> - will java-gnome ever succeed
> - have we any chance of upgrading our bindings to the next gtk+
> - does anybody really want to use java-gnome anyway
> - will gnome be written in mono in a few years time
> - ... and so java-gnome never really be of any use
> - what should the project aims be in the next few months
> - is there anything we could do better than we're doing it no
> - (most importantly) should I invest more time in java-gnome and try 
> my best to
>   help it along
>

All *very* good questions!  I'll throw my opinions in below...

> There doesn't seem to have been anything happening with the bindings 
> lately as
> far as I can see. That seems true in general in the past. I'm 
> wondering what can
> be done to change this. Is it just something with our build system we 
> need to
> change? a new tutorial for glade perhaps? something else?
>
For me, I just let my time get eaten up with tons of other things in my 
everyday life.  I want to get back into working on the gtkhtml bindings 
and make it so that people want to use them.  One problem I've been 
dealing with is getting some of this stuff working on my Mac.  I 
managed to get gcj working on the Mac, and with fink, I believe i can 
make progress.  My big problem is that my Linux box is at home... and 
my Mac is a Powerbook, so I carry it everywhere.  I'm hoping that if I 
can make progress on using Mac OS X, I can work on this a lot more.

> Sorry if this message seems completely random - it is. I'm just not 
> sure whether
> to spend my limited time on java-gnome or some other project right 
> now. Please
> let me know what you think to the questions above and any others you 
> have.
> Please also say what you think of the project in general and perhaps 
> your
> motivations for working on it. Thanks a lot in advance for any 
> responses you
> give, or even if nobody responds; I'm sure it'll help me decide.
>
I think that your concerns are well-founded, and we (as a team) should 
make an effort to move forward with this project.  Having said that, 
I'll provide answers to your questions... :)

Will java-gnome ever succeed?  I'd like to think it has great potential 
to succeed.  With the push from Novell, I believe Gnome is going to 
start moving even faster.

Have we any chance of upgrading our bindings to the next gtk+?  I'm not 
sure how involved this is, but considering how helpful everyone has 
been so far, I think we can do this.  I'm certainly willing to help.

Does anyone ever want to use java-gnome?  I DO. *grin*  I enjoy Java 
development and would love to use it for Gnome apps.

Will Gnome be written in Mono?  I have no idea, but I have to believe 
that they will provide hooks for as many languages as possible.  I 
can't imagine an edict coming down that requires every developer to use 
a CIL-compliant language.

What should the project aims be?  I'd say we need to get everyone on 
the same page (this especially applies to ME) and decide on our aims 
and focus.

Whether or not you want to invest time in Java-gnome is, obviously, 
your choice... I'd hope you will because, dammit, SOMEONE needs to help 
me when I do something stupid!

Mark Davidson

On Thu, 2004-30-09 at 22:00 +0100, Mark Howard wrote:
> I've been thinking a lot about java-gnome today.=20

You know, I've been wanting to have this conversation for a while. I
even went so far as to get Jeffery Morgan's phone number so I could call
him and ask some of these questions.

Before I go into inline responses to your questions, I'd like to observe
that I spent the last 6 months on an fairly intensive* research project
to try and figure out what development platform to use. In fact, I gave
a presentation about it:
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/talks/WelcomeToMyNightmare/

The real crux of the matter was the tension between the fact that I'm a
Java programmer with long Unix/Linux experience, and the fact that of
course most environments out there are Windows. It took me a while to
get over that, and realize that I only cared about developing for Linux.
Secondly, I really wanted to develop a gnome app, but I really don't
have the C skills. I started in C almost two decades ago, but the modern
C frameworks are a disaster zone [this conclusion reached from years of
trying to understand enough of evolution to hack on it, and having read
Matthias Warkus's book "Official Gnome 2 Developers Guide"]. No way did
I want to work in C.

[* for a not-core-to-my-business activity; I'm a management consultant,
not a professional programmer.]

Well, I stumbled across java-gnome, and have spent a goodly amount of
time playing with it (for lack of a better term) and seeing if the
various aspects of it would wokr for me. [This week I'm actually stress
testing Mark's TreeModel stuff]. So far so good!

[Found a bug in libglade, which someone needs to tell me how to submit a
patch for]

One thing I'd like to observe - the sourceforge lists aren't helping.
I'd suggest two things:

1) move the lists to gnome.org (or where-ever).

2) open up java-gnome-hackers. [or, at the very least, make it clear
that a) the list exists, and b) that people can join it]. While the
division between the people using, and the people hacking on, the
bindings makes sense, at the moment it is perhaps diluting things below
critical mass?

I've had some pretty good conversations with people on #gnome-hackers
and #gentoo-java about java-gnome - people who are really using it, in
real life, so I certainly want to do what I can to support the people
that are giving us the platform that we're benefiting from.

So, on to the questions:

> Questions like:
> - will java-gnome ever succeed
> - have we any chance of upgrading our bindings to the next gtk+=20


> - will gnome be written in mono in a few years time

It's very likely that Evolution will be rewritten in C#, but

a) really, who cares?

b) at the moment, all the GTK# bindings are just language bindings to
the underlying C libraries. Sound familiar?

> - ... and so java-gnome never really be of any use

c) java-gnome is prettier than GTK#!

d) there are those of us who are worried about patent encumbered issues
in the .Net framework. I personally believe that while Mono is a
brilliant effort, it is too vulnerable to sabotage. [Yes, this from
someone using Java. Well, the Java language definition may be closely
held, but so what? And, with efforts like GCJ, Kaffe, and SableVM well
advanced, its becoming less of a problem, even for Debian zealots. And
with IBM strongly backing Java, it's not going away anytime soon]

> - what should the project aims be in the next few months

Maybe make it easier for people to contribute?

some ideas:

1) the mailing list thing observed above

2) switch to arch, maybe? [I'm not an arch fanatic, but perhaps it would
make contributing easier than monolithic gnome CVS?]

3) yeah, the top level build thing needs a wee touch of refining.

> There doesn't seem to have been anything happening with the bindings late=
ly as
> far as I can see. That seems true in general in the past.

You know, that's not all bad. The fact that you guys just massively re-
organized the libraries is pretty impressive. Also, the fact that code
written several years ago is still working well is quite a testament.

[Flipside, of course, is that there are bundles of code that are, to all
intents and purposes unmaintained, or, written from different
perspectives]

> a new tutorial for glade perhaps?

The test work I alluded to has headed towards a reasonable set of
workable examples which I hope to be able to contribute in some form.

> Please also say what you think of the project in general and perhaps your
> motivations for working on it.

'Cause I'm thrilled to have a set of java bindings which allow me to
write a native Gnome app, and want the effort to continue and succeed.


AfC
Sydney

--=20
Andrew Frederick Cowie

OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS
Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/

Hello Mark, Mark, Luca and all you other j-g developers,

I've never really contributed. I'm more of a (ab)user... you might say
"a leach". 

What I've "leached", though, I've loved.

Frankly, I hate swing. I think it's ugly and convoluted. Windows, I hate
it just as much AND I think it's ugly and convoluted and as such I don't
have much interest in making my work available there. GTK? I love it,
it's beautiful. Java? I love it. It effectively makes me a good
programmer without much effort on my part.

Now, where does java-gnome fit into this tirade. 

Well, I get to program in my favorite language (I'll never switch to
mono, sorry; not as long as the gcj project is alive anyway) and I get
to use my favorite widget/UI framework.

Then there's Glade... 

Well let's just say that these are the contents of my tool chest:

- gcj
- java-gnome
- glade (due to j-g)
- Eclipse (to manage it all)

I'd have to say that I would very much miss j-g. I can honestly admit
that I've missed the activity on the g-j lists and I'd hoped that it
(all your hard work) hadn't been all for naught.

I suppose had I been a little more of a pest this summer as I'd been
during the school year (I WAS using jg for my thesis and got many
compliments on the beautiful UI) it might have indicated to you that you
have at least one satisfied user.

But, now that I'm settled in a full time job, I plan to do more
development and I wouldn't do that without opening my toolbox.

Personally, the biggest barrier I can currently see in obtaining
widespread use of j-g is it's non-availability on any standard distros.

I think if the team made the next major task to ensure jg could be
build, and as a result packaged, (even if it meant back-porting some of
the features to gnome 2.6) on standard Fedora, Debian, Suse (and maybe
attract some of the good Novell attention), Mandrake, etc. you'd see the
number of people exploring jg's use grow by double in six months.

Right now, less savvy Linux users (many of them actually Java
programmers) quickly give up on j-g because it's too complex to setup.

That's my two cents,

-- 
Ray Auge <rayauge@...>
Check out what I've been doing at http://plaster.sourceforge.net


On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 15:46 -0700, Mark Davidson wrote:
> Hi Mark--
> 
> On Sep 30, 2004, at 2:00 PM, Mark Howard wrote:
> 
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I've been thinking a lot about java-gnome today.
> > Questions like:
> > - will java-gnome ever succeed
> > - have we any chance of upgrading our bindings to the next gtk+
> > - does anybody really want to use java-gnome anyway
> > - will gnome be written in mono in a few years time
> > - ... and so java-gnome never really be of any use
> > - what should the project aims be in the next few months
> > - is there anything we could do better than we're doing it no
> > - (most importantly) should I invest more time in java-gnome and try 
> > my best to
> >   help it along
> >
> 
> All *very* good questions!  I'll throw my opinions in below...
> 
> > There doesn't seem to have been anything happening with the bindings 
> > lately as
> > far as I can see. That seems true in general in the past. I'm 
> > wondering what can
> > be done to change this. Is it just something with our build system we 
> > need to
> > change? a new tutorial for glade perhaps? something else?
> >
> For me, I just let my time get eaten up with tons of other things in my 
> everyday life.  I want to get back into working on the gtkhtml bindings 
> and make it so that people want to use them.  One problem I've been 
> dealing with is getting some of this stuff working on my Mac.  I 
> managed to get gcj working on the Mac, and with fink, I believe i can 
> make progress.  My big problem is that my Linux box is at home... and 
> my Mac is a Powerbook, so I carry it everywhere.  I'm hoping that if I 
> can make progress on using Mac OS X, I can work on this a lot more.
> 
> > Sorry if this message seems completely random - it is. I'm just not 
> > sure whether
> > to spend my limited time on java-gnome or some other project right 
> > now. Please
> > let me know what you think to the questions above and any others you 
> > have.
> > Please also say what you think of the project in general and perhaps 
> > your
> > motivations for working on it. Thanks a lot in advance for any 
> > responses you
> > give, or even if nobody responds; I'm sure it'll help me decide.
> >
> I think that your concerns are well-founded, and we (as a team) should 
> make an effort to move forward with this project.  Having said that, 
> I'll provide answers to your questions... :)
> 
> Will java-gnome ever succeed?  I'd like to think it has great potential 
> to succeed.  With the push from Novell, I believe Gnome is going to 
> start moving even faster.
> 
> Have we any chance of upgrading our bindings to the next gtk+?  I'm not 
> sure how involved this is, but considering how helpful everyone has 
> been so far, I think we can do this.  I'm certainly willing to help.
> 
> Does anyone ever want to use java-gnome?  I DO. *grin*  I enjoy Java 
> development and would love to use it for Gnome apps.
> 
> Will Gnome be written in Mono?  I have no idea, but I have to believe 
> that they will provide hooks for as many languages as possible.  I 
> can't imagine an edict coming down that requires every developer to use 
> a CIL-compliant language.
> 
> What should the project aims be?  I'd say we need to get everyone on 
> the same page (this especially applies to ME) and decide on our aims 
> and focus.
> 
> Whether or not you want to invest time in Java-gnome is, obviously, 
> your choice... I'd hope you will because, dammit, SOMEONE needs to help 
> me when I do something stupid!
> 
> Mark Davidson
>

Nice to see some quick followups!  :)

I, too, prefer a Unix-based system with Java.  I just started playing 
with Mono, but I can't see myself switching over to it full-time.  I'd 
much rather use Java.

And I have the same problem as you do with Windows... there are lots of 
nice tools on Windows, but that ship sailed for me YEARS ago (I was a 
Windows developer for 15 years), and I don't miss it one bit.  The same 
goes for C... I spent YEARS writing C code, and I have no desire to 
dive back into THAT pool.

So, for me, it's Unix/Linux and Java!

Mark

On Sep 30, 2004, at 5:12 PM, Ray Auge wrote:

> Hello Mark, Mark, Luca and all you other j-g developers,
>
> I've never really contributed. I'm more of a (ab)user... you might say
> "a leach".
>
> What I've "leached", though, I've loved.
>
> Frankly, I hate swing. I think it's ugly and convoluted. Windows, I 
> hate
> it just as much AND I think it's ugly and convoluted and as such I 
> don't
> have much interest in making my work available there. GTK? I love it,
> it's beautiful. Java? I love it. It effectively makes me a good
> programmer without much effort on my part.
>
> Now, where does java-gnome fit into this tirade.
>
> Well, I get to program in my favorite language (I'll never switch to
> mono, sorry; not as long as the gcj project is alive anyway) and I get
> to use my favorite widget/UI framework.
>
> Then there's Glade...
>
> Well let's just say that these are the contents of my tool chest:
>
> - gcj
> - java-gnome
> - glade (due to j-g)
> - Eclipse (to manage it all)
>
> I'd have to say that I would very much miss j-g. I can honestly admit
> that I've missed the activity on the g-j lists and I'd hoped that it
> (all your hard work) hadn't been all for naught.
>
> I suppose had I been a little more of a pest this summer as I'd been
> during the school year (I WAS using jg for my thesis and got many
> compliments on the beautiful UI) it might have indicated to you that 
> you
> have at least one satisfied user.
>
> But, now that I'm settled in a full time job, I plan to do more
> development and I wouldn't do that without opening my toolbox.
>
> Personally, the biggest barrier I can currently see in obtaining
> widespread use of j-g is it's non-availability on any standard distros.
>
> I think if the team made the next major task to ensure jg could be
> build, and as a result packaged, (even if it meant back-porting some of
> the features to gnome 2.6) on standard Fedora, Debian, Suse (and maybe
> attract some of the good Novell attention), Mandrake, etc. you'd see 
> the
> number of people exploring jg's use grow by double in six months.
>
> Right now, less savvy Linux users (many of them actually Java
> programmers) quickly give up on j-g because it's too complex to setup.
>
> That's my two cents,
>
> -- 
> Ray Auge <rayauge@...>
> Check out what I've been doing at http://plaster.sourceforge.net
>
>
> On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 15:46 -0700, Mark Davidson wrote:
>> Hi Mark--
>>
>> On Sep 30, 2004, at 2:00 PM, Mark Howard wrote:
>>
>>> Hello everyone,
>>>
>>> I've been thinking a lot about java-gnome today.
>>> Questions like:
>>> - will java-gnome ever succeed
>>> - have we any chance of upgrading our bindings to the next gtk+
>>> - does anybody really want to use java-gnome anyway
>>> - will gnome be written in mono in a few years time
>>> - ... and so java-gnome never really be of any use
>>> - what should the project aims be in the next few months
>>> - is there anything we could do better than we're doing it no
>>> - (most importantly) should I invest more time in java-gnome and try
>>> my best to
>>>   help it along
>>>
>>
>> All *very* good questions!  I'll throw my opinions in below...
>>
>>> There doesn't seem to have been anything happening with the bindings
>>> lately as
>>> far as I can see. That seems true in general in the past. I'm
>>> wondering what can
>>> be done to change this. Is it just something with our build system we
>>> need to
>>> change? a new tutorial for glade perhaps? something else?
>>>
>> For me, I just let my time get eaten up with tons of other things in 
>> my
>> everyday life.  I want to get back into working on the gtkhtml 
>> bindings
>> and make it so that people want to use them.  One problem I've been
>> dealing with is getting some of this stuff working on my Mac.  I
>> managed to get gcj working on the Mac, and with fink, I believe i can
>> make progress.  My big problem is that my Linux box is at home... and
>> my Mac is a Powerbook, so I carry it everywhere.  I'm hoping that if I
>> can make progress on using Mac OS X, I can work on this a lot more.
>>
>>> Sorry if this message seems completely random - it is. I'm just not
>>> sure whether
>>> to spend my limited time on java-gnome or some other project right
>>> now. Please
>>> let me know what you think to the questions above and any others you
>>> have.
>>> Please also say what you think of the project in general and perhaps
>>> your
>>> motivations for working on it. Thanks a lot in advance for any
>>> responses you
>>> give, or even if nobody responds; I'm sure it'll help me decide.
>>>
>> I think that your concerns are well-founded, and we (as a team) should
>> make an effort to move forward with this project.  Having said that,
>> I'll provide answers to your questions... :)
>>
>> Will java-gnome ever succeed?  I'd like to think it has great 
>> potential
>> to succeed.  With the push from Novell, I believe Gnome is going to
>> start moving even faster.
>>
>> Have we any chance of upgrading our bindings to the next gtk+?  I'm 
>> not
>> sure how involved this is, but considering how helpful everyone has
>> been so far, I think we can do this.  I'm certainly willing to help.
>>
>> Does anyone ever want to use java-gnome?  I DO. *grin*  I enjoy Java
>> development and would love to use it for Gnome apps.
>>
>> Will Gnome be written in Mono?  I have no idea, but I have to believe
>> that they will provide hooks for as many languages as possible.  I
>> can't imagine an edict coming down that requires every developer to 
>> use
>> a CIL-compliant language.
>>
>> What should the project aims be?  I'd say we need to get everyone on
>> the same page (this especially applies to ME) and decide on our aims
>> and focus.
>>
>> Whether or not you want to invest time in Java-gnome is, obviously,
>> your choice... I'd hope you will because, dammit, SOMEONE needs to 
>> help
>> me when I do something stupid!
>>
>> Mark Davidson
>>
>
>
>
>
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>

On Thu, 2004-30-09 at 17:40 -0700, Mark Davidson wrote:
> So, for me, it's Unix/Linux and Java!

... people who really would love to be able to write Gnome programs [or
at the least, use GTK as widget set], but, through circumstance, are
very competent, established Java programmers, not C programmers, and so
GTK (and thus app development on Linux) has been unaccessible to them.

Certainly the core GNOME community isn't going to help them - to the
point of active apathy

... but you'd be surprised the number of people in that same community
I've spoke to who have perked up when I said I was using GTK on Linux
from Java, and said "really? Hey, that's cool."

And,

For me, the ability to use GCJ to build native executables is brilliant.
It makes writing little apps possible, and lord knows that a little
executable is far better than a shell wrapper around firing up some Java
VM monstrosity.

Indeed, even getting JVMs installed can be tricky on some distributions.
I expect the sufficiently-high-GCC-so-as-to-have-GCJ-plus-compile-
libraries-the-right-way thing to be just as tricky for a while, but if
we start focusing on that now, we should have widespread availability in
about a year. I've made sure that Gentoo is on track for that (in fact,
they're pretty good to go now).

Mark, and chance of getting java-gnome 2.6.a-patch-or two into Sarge?

AfC
Sydney

SourceForge.net wrote:

>Feature Requests item #935505, was opened at 2004-04-15 02:09
>Message generated for change (Comment added) made by nobody
>You can respond by visiting:
>https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=351522&aid=935505&group_id=1522
>
>Category: New feature
>Group: None
>Status: Open
>Priority: 5
>Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
>Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
>Summary: Building on another platforms (Win32, MacOS,etc.)
>
>Initial Comment:
>Java is crossplatform language. Java-gnome should be
>crossplatform too.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
>Date: 2004-09-24 13:44
>
>Message:
>Logged In: NO
>
>that's also my opinion... java-gnome/-gtk would be much more
>interesting for developers, if crossplatform-support was
>provided. i think java-gnome/-gtk is a great idea, but no
>one's interested in rewriting the gui of a java-app for
>other operating-systems.
>  
>
Thanks for your interest to Java-GNOME project. I'm one of new project
developers. So, other guys can be not agree with me.

The main goal of Java-GNOME project is grant a possibility to develop
GUI applications based on GNOME2 toolkit. So, we orient on *nix developers
mainly. In my opinion, no reason to develop GUI for Win32 or MacOS using
GNOME2 because there are other graphical frameworks. If you want to
have cross platform application your chose is JFC/Swing.
Also, I'm not sure about porting GNOME 2 under Win32 and MacOS.

-- 
Best regards,
Michael

Il giorno sab, 25-09-2004 alle 10:19 +0300, Michael ha scritto:
> SourceForge.net wrote:
> 
> >Feature Requests item #935505, was opened at 2004-04-15 02:09
> >Message generated for change (Comment added) made by nobody
> >You can respond by visiting:
> >https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=351522&aid=935505&group_id=1522
> >
> >Category: New feature
> >Group: None
> >Status: Open
> >Priority: 5
> >Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
> >Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
> >Summary: Building on another platforms (Win32, MacOS,etc.)
> >
> >Initial Comment:
> >Java is crossplatform language. Java-gnome should be
> >crossplatform too.
> >
> >----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
> >Date: 2004-09-24 13:44
> >
> >Message:
> >Logged In: NO
> >
> >that's also my opinion... java-gnome/-gtk would be much more
> >interesting for developers, if crossplatform-support was
> >provided. i think java-gnome/-gtk is a great idea, but no
> >one's interested in rewriting the gui of a java-app for
> >other operating-systems.
> >  
> >
> Thanks for your interest to Java-GNOME project. I'm one of new project
> developers. So, other guys can be not agree with me.
> 
> The main goal of Java-GNOME project is grant a possibility to develop
> GUI applications based on GNOME2 toolkit. So, we orient on *nix developers
> mainly. In my opinion, no reason to develop GUI for Win32 or MacOS using
> GNOME2 because there are other graphical frameworks. If you want to
> have cross platform application your chose is JFC/Swing.
> Also, I'm not sure about porting GNOME 2 under Win32 and MacOS.
No, but a libgtkjava port on win32 would be nice, since gtk+ on win32
works well.
Also if you want cross-platform there is SWT.
-- 
Luca De Rugeriis <piedamaro@...>

Hi Jens,

Jens Reimann wrote:

>Hi,
>
>just wanted to known what you think about the properties patch I submitted?
>
>didn't hear much about that on the list!?!
>
>  
>
I think Java-GNOME team have a rest. That's way nobody answered you.
Let's wait a litle :)

>anything I can do??
>
>jens reimann
>
>
>
>
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>  
>


-- 
Best regards,
Michael