This entry is just a reminder, so I can look at it a few months from now, and look if I made any progress at all...
First I created two open source projects, called:
- MDIFramework, which aim to provide a ready-to-use desktop application infrastructure in Java. I mainly created this project because I always reused the same piece of code in my own work, so I wanted to have a generic library instead. I thought it was better to open source it, so that's what I've done. Seems that there is not a lot of activity in this project for some time, but I have upgraded the code internally, and I will soon upload a lot of code, and bump version to 0.2. I perfectly understand that this project is not very relevant now that the Appframework and the associated JSR have been created, and the relevant code integrated in Netbeans. But I used my own library before this existed, and it is not always easy to switch to another framework. Maybe I will do it in a little while...
- MDIUtilities, which is a utility library with various classes in the swing, IO, geometry, etc... fields. There's tons of other libraries in the open, but it is not always easy when all you want is a small library to provide utility classes. Sometimes you could end-up with tons of different libraries, for which you only use few classes.
And now, for possible new directions:
- A Java port of Povray. There's a problem with the license (Povray began when GPL did not even exist, so it's not really open source for now, even if they will maybe distribute the next version under a GPLv3 license), but at least I may never begin this work, and I still could give it to the Povray team. I would really like to benchmark the Java version against the C reference. Even if I know that the C version will be faster than the Java one, the question is to what extend ?
- Perl on Java, to be able to reuse simple Perl scripts in the Java world. There is already a language called Sleep (in LGPL) which does even more than that, so I think that could be "easy" (just kidding)
- The same thing for C (what, C ?), also using JNA to leverage legacy C libraries. What would be wonderful would be to be able reuse small C programs as scripts (or even compiled code, but here I'm dreaming) in the Java world without even have to bother with compilation options, and also to be able to debug much much much much more easily (dynamic allocation, pointers, etc...). But I'm sure this one would not be an easy one
- Open Dynamic Engine ported to Java. It would be interesting, for example to use it with a Java game engine such as JMonkey Engine (which already is able to do fabulous things)
But for now, I will have to send patches to the Batik Java library (the most conformant SVG library, I think). Patches will be in the area of WMF to SVG conversion.
