<Swing Dev> Project proposal: fbtoolkit

[Dmitri Trembovetski]

 > * full screen video games
 >   We would like to let people use Swing components as the heads up
 > display in full screen video games. This means running in an environment
 > where there is no windowing system at all.  This would also be useful
 > for kiosks and other semi-embedded environments.

   You can do that right now, Swing works (mostly) fine in fullscreen
   mode.

   Thanks,
     Dmitri



Joshua Marinacci wrote:
> I'm not sure who exactly would want to sponsor this project and which 
> teams would be involved. Since AWT, 2D, and Swing are so closely related 
> they would likely all be involved.  I can speak, however, to the 
> practical need for this project.  There are many use cases for a 
> completely virtualized toolkit.  
> 
> * www.glossitope.org <http://www.glossitope.org>
>  This is a project I started which lets you write widgets that run on 
> your desktop in Java. The version I prepared for JavaOne has lots of 
> cool effects that involve scaling, shearing, and otherwise animating the 
> widgets in weird ways.  Since the widgets are just Swing panels I draw 
> them into buffered images and then blit those to the screen.  This has 
> lots of odd problems that are hard to fix properly, such as dealing with 
> focus, handling combobox popups, and keyboard events.  These problems 
> are difficult (if not impossible) to solve outside of core.
> 
> * Project Looking Glass
>   Paul Byrne and I have discussed this extensively and he even had 
> another researcher start building a headless AWT that could be projected 
> into the Java3D scene graph. They got pretty far but ran into a few 
> places where AWT assumes it has a real windowing system with access to 
> X11 window handles. These are also impossible to fix without changes to 
> core.  Solveing this would let them put Swing applications directly into 
> the 3d environment
> 
> * JOGL Minimal Scene Graph
>   Ken Russell and others would like to project Swing components directly 
> into the JOGL scene graph that they are building. This would let you 
> have a Swing panel that appears normal but can then slide into the 
> background to be replaced by other panel.
> 
> * full screen video games
>   We would like to let people use Swing components as the heads up 
> display in full screen video games. This means running in an environment 
> where there is no windowing system at all.  This would also be useful 
> for kiosks and other semi-embedded environments.
> 
> 
> So you can see, there is a great need for a virtualized Toolkit. I think 
> that most of the work could be done at the AWT level (and hopefully let 
> me scrap most of my Swing level hacks) but undoubtedly it will affect 
> many areas in core.  This is something that is vitally needed to let us 
> take Java SE into new environments.
> 
> thx,
> Josh
> 
>>> Allow me to clarify, as well, that the purpose of this project
>>> is experimental and for prototyping.  Think of this as a KSL [2]
>>> style Project that should be associated with the appropriate
>>> Group (i.e. 2D or AWT).  Obviously such a Project, if approved, would
>>> need a VCS "sandbox" as described in [1]: "Projects that are not
>>> tightly related to the development of JDK 7 will, for now, also be
>>> given a regular java.net project within the java.net OpenJDK Community."
>>>
>>> Can we get a Group sponsor?
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>
>> I don't think we have a clue what sponsorship means.  It certainly 
>> can't mean in  this case any
>> work from Sun engineers ( wish we had time for such ideas ourselves), 
>> or taking it back into openjdk
>> in any time in the forseeable future.
>>
>> It just seems like an  interesting expt  this time, with  unproven  
>> practical applications.
> 
> 
> 
> - Blasting forth in three part harmony!
> 
>