[Java-gnome-developer] Hello ... and thank you !

[Charles-H. d'A. <cda...@gm...>]

Hello every body !

This a not so short mail to introduce myself on this mailing list and
to say thank you for your amazing work.

I am Charles-Henri d'Adhemar from France (Nice) but people often call me chicha.
I am a developer working in IT technologies in the travel industry.
I have been participating in some Free Software projects more or less
actively depending on my life evolution (student with lots of time to
family man with very few time).

I have been looking for a nice toolkit for hacking around at home when
time permit and I found GTK a really nice one as well as the wide GTK
community (Gnome, XFCE ...).

Then I have been looking for a nice and fun programming language. At
work we use a lot C/C++. I have to say that I do not like this
language : too much traps even for experienced developers, not enough
nice and homogeneous integrated libraries. Fortunately I had the
opportunity to discover and use Java at work and I love it.

However at the beginning I started to hack with GTK and Perl, then
C#/Mono, then Python ... until I read a message from one of you on the
gnome planet about java-gnome.
I liked Perl, C#/Mono and Python. There are all great Free Software
and open communities. But what you are doing here at java-gnome is
awesome !!!


What I like a lot :

- Your website : simple and useful.

- Your documentation and examples : Seeing developers taking the time
to write good api and examples is a sign that their work is really
good because they put their "clients" (application developers) at the
center of the development process. Wen you read the documentation you
feel like the developers really wanted to please their users instead
of taking some good time for themselves first.

- Your bindings : it really integrates well with Java. Also I am
always amazed by all the good GTK bindings around the world. I am not
enough experienced to say it is better than others but I just think
you succeeded in integrating well with Java.


What I do not like  :

- Your communication : Mono guys make a lot of buzz around various
planets (which I think is too much), and applications made using Mono
also make a lot of noise (banshee is one of them). We all know Novell
is behind this. But I think java-gnome deserves to be known more !
However I think that what is going on on the java side and the facts
it is becoming completely Open and Free software will bring you more
users and a great future, as well as the great quality of your work !

Here is an example to illustrate this point : I do not know of a
single application made using java-gnome, and I cannot find a list of
those on the website.


My questions :

- You are using a home made build system, "Equivalence" and you plan
to use a new one, "Fabricate" : it is hard to Google with such names
;-) Are those projects mature enough for usage outside java-gnome ? I
would like to make people build my software using ./configure make
install (to be independent from eclipse) but I do not want to use
autotools ...


- I use Mandriva 2009.0 as my GNU/Linux Distribution. Unfortunatly
they packaged the old and deprecated bindings.
I made a rpm spec file to build java-gnome and have it packaged. The
only thing which is not right is that I have to hardcode the path to
the jdk on the ./configure line because it is not detected.
I will be please to help and package the new java-gnome for Mandriva
:-) Any recommendation before I start looking at java-gnome's
configure script to support Mandriva and submit the patch ?

Congratulations, and thank you very much to all of you !
Chicha.