Re: [Rails-devel] Swing Docking Framework for Rails

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 8:35 AM, Stefan Frey <ste...@we...> wrote:
> Frederick:
>
> thanks for sharing your prototype.
>
> A general remark first:
> Agreement on the tools is good, however I do not know if everyone has to
> commit to one framework before you could start.
> Three reasons for that: First Rails could support several UIs and second
> the one who codes is the one who has to live with the choice.
> And third not everyone has the time to do a full evaluation, so most
> cannot commit themselves at this time.
> If you come up with something that looks nice both in practice and in
> code people will trust that your choice was the right one.
>

+1. Agreed.

>
> On the choice of libraries:
> A docking framework was on my radar at the time I started coding on
> Rails. I actually did have a look at some of the frameworks (but not
> actually trying to code against them) and DockingFrames was my favorite
> at that time too (and it is still under development, which is good given
> that Swing is not a rising star anymore). Alternatives at that time I
> really considered have been Infonode (dual licensed with GPL) or Jide
> (provides free licences to open source projects on request).
>

A quick note about licensing. This is an incredibly thorny issue. I
don't want to jump too far down this rabbit hole, but I'd like to
provide at least some basic guidance.

When considering any libraries or frameworks for use, please only
consider those with GPL-compatible licensing. (See:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses )

Our main code base is licensed under the GPL v2 or newer, and so any
libraries or frameworks we rely on must be able to play nicely with
our own code. :-)

> I also had a look at alternative LayoutManagers and my preference there
> was to test at least DesignGridLayout
> (http://designgridlayout.java.net/index.html), which seems both easy to
> use and provides a lot of features.
>
> UI development in the longer run:
> That is my major concern at the moment: One of the design goals of
> Rails2.0 state and model refactoring is the optimization of UI update
> messages: The amount of round-trip messages between the game engine and
> the UI should be minimal to allow running the game over low-bandwidth
> and latent connections. This would strongly broaden the possibilities of
> UI creation to have the UI for example running inside a browser or on a
> mobile gadget.
> Still as this is a long-run development it does not conflict with your
> short to medium-term of refactoring the Swing UI, but I want to share
> my thoughts on that.
>
> A target for me that comes before rewriting the UI, but still after the
> core Rails2.0 refactoring is multi-player support via the internet.
> My current intention is to employ the XMPP-Protocol, which should in
> principle allow us to rely on existing XMPP-servers which provide the
> required functionality. This might have some impact on the UI, but I do
> not expect that to be to serious, as in a first approach every player
> will have its own game engine running on its local PC which are
> synchronized via messages (similar to how VASSAL works, but replacing
> the central VASSAL server by a multi-puropose XMPP server, which if I
> remember correctly is something VASSAL intends to do in the future too).
>
> No time to have a look at the patch so far, so nothing on that.
>
> Stefan
>

---Brett.

>
>
> On 02/02/2012 01:56 PM, Frederick Weld wrote:
>> I've done some internet research for finding the "best" LGPL Swing
>> docking framework, which appears to be DockingFrames. Based on that
>> framework, I developed a very small prototype that puts that OR Window
>> on the docking framework.
>>
>> Instead of pushing to prototype to the dev branch, I attached it as
>> patches so that you can have a look at this technology.
>>
>> In any case, I think we need to have a strong buy-in by everyone
>> before being able to move to this framework.
>>
>> -- Frederick
>>
>> ===============
>> Details: DockingFrames
>> ===============
>>
>> Links:
>> - Homepage: http://dock.javaforge.com/
>> - Javadoc: http://dock.javaforge.com/dockingFrames_v1.1.0/doc/index.html
>> - Examples: http://dock.javaforge.com/help.html
>> - Forum: http://forum.byte-welt.de/forumdisplay.php?f=69&langid=2
>>
>> Key advantages (at the first glance)
>> - LGPL
>> - Allows for both
>>     - convenient access to docking functionality ("common" jar")
>>         ->  easy to start with (see prototype)
>>     - deep configurability ("core" jar)
>>         ->  easy to adapt to future more sophisticated requirements
>> - Rich feature set
>>
>> ===============
>> Details: Prototype
>> ===============
>>
>> Implementation:
>> - added just about 20 lines to ORWindow
>> - had to suppress triggering ORWindow revalidation as the docking
>> framework takes care of that
>>
>> First findings:
>> - dockables can be detached from their master frame
>>     ->  finally, the OR panel can be put somewhere else
>> - Stefan will like the docking tooltips - others probably not... ^_^
>>     - but should be no issue to find out how to set them to English
>>
>>
>>
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