[Xweb-developers] Reactivating development

[Peter B. <pe...@pe...>]

Hi all,

with some nice little example of synchronicity two things happened 
yesterday: (1) a friend of mine (Jon) and I decided to do some work on 
XWeb and (2) someone (Hendrik) mailed a bunch of patches.

I moved the discussion about (2) onto the list (as you noticed). Here 
are some updates about the rest of the development:

1.0: a few weeks ago Thomas DeWeese (of Batik fame) and I worked out how 
to fix the problem that stopped me from calling XWeb 1.0 a final. It is 
related to the gAMA chunks in PNG, the problems with that are described 
here: http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/png-gamma.html. The CVS Batik of 
Batik works for me now, at the moment I am still waiting for a new 
release, if that doesn't happen I might just do a build from CVS.

1.1: my plans are adding some of the most requested features. There have 
been some changes in the trunk for a while, most noticably an 
<imageCopy> option, which can be used to rescale images. Other things 
I'd like to see:
- globbing and regexp for <entryset>s and <fileset>s -- that should 
match things like "*.xml" to "*.html" conversions
- support for more operations, e.g. JTidy and FOP, maybe Freemarker 
(http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/) or (rather later) things similar to 
this: http://www.mullassery.com/software/ANT/index.jsp or this: 
http://www.oopsconsultancy.com/software/xmltask.html -- I wonder if 
integrating Ant tasks in general would be hard.
- a large refactoring towards a process-oriented model with at least two 
iterations through the chains (prepare, do)
- more sophisticated distributions, I'd like to see some installer (many 
users stumble on the environment setup bit) and maybe using jstub 
instead of batch/script files (http://www.roxes.com/produkte/rat.html)

Jon wants to have a go at the frontend bit, at least some tree 
manipulations with a text editor pane, maybe integration of something 
like ekit (http://www.hexidec.com/ekit.php) or dreaming#7 
(http://dreaming.sourceforge.net/) as HTML editors. Shell-execute on 
Windows is easy, too -- to open files in their default application. So 
far I haven't seen any really good way to do this on UNIX systems, the 
best thing I know is this: http://browserlauncher.sourceforge.net/. If 
someone knows something better, please shout.

Hopefully you'll see quite a few changes happening soon. It's a good 
time to request features, too :-)

  Peter