[jsword-devel] display methods

[Joe Walker]

So JEditorPane in JDK1.4 makes a fairly lousy HTML renderer. I've been 
weighing up some alternatives.
The requirements are, it must:
- work using XML input
- be easily understood for the developer (which fairly much means HTML)
- work over webstart
- be freely re-distributable
- allow some DHTML like flexibility

Some of those are tough requirements, but here's what I've come up with.

JEditorPane in JDK1.4:
    does not do JavaScript or CSS level anything

JEditorPane in JDK1.5:
    big improvement - does CSS, but not JavaScript. Not released for 
another 6 months?

JRex (Embed Mozilla)
    very good html displayer, but probably very complex to get working 
and installed, especially over WebStart. JNI+webstart anyone? see 
http://jrex.mozdev.org/index.html

Jazilla (Mozilla re-write in Java)
    Interesting project, but one that seems more interested in XUL than 
the Java renderer, proceeding slowly. see 
http://jazilla.mcbridematt.sniperhq.net/

JXWB (OSS Java Browser)
    Commercial software made free. Works well with Swing (includes 
customized implementations of javax.swing.text.Document and 
javax.swing.text.EditorKit) Things have moved on quite a bit recently. 
See http://sourceforge.net/projects/jxwb

IceBrowser
    Not free but otherwise excellent solution supporting all major web 
standards. See http://www.icesoft.com/products/icebrowser.html

SWT Browser Component
    Don't think we could easily embed an SWT component in swing (since 
SWT is heavyweight in AWT speak) and I don't particularly want to 
re-write the whole app in SWT. However there are 2 projects to allow use 
of SWT from a swing API. SwingWT is a swing-like proxy to SWT 
(http://swingwt.sourceforge.net/) and MasterCL 
(http://chrriis.brainlex.com/projects/mastercl/) will allow you to 
dynamically swap package names to make the whole of swing use SWT 
dynamically.
It is possible to use SWT from webstart - irate radio do it 
(http://irate.sf.net/) although their build scripts are not very helpful.

FOP -> PNG
    FOP is XSL:FO renderer (http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html) that 
can create PDFs and various graphics files. Could give very slick 
output, but no DHTML, quite slow and FO is not easy to use. Probably 
not  one of the best ideas.

Dynamic Swing GUI
    There are plenty of XML->Swing converters. JDK 1.4 even includes 
one. Maybe we could write a OSIS->SwingXML converter in XSL and then 
render OSIS text in swing components. Could be very fancy. XSL could be 
complex.


Does anyone have any experience in any of these, or any alternative 
solutions?
I'm thinking it would be good to have a pluggable system, but I'm not 
sure which of these to turn to first. I'm thinking (in order) JXWB, 
Dynamic Swing GUI, SwingWT, JRex at the moment.

Thanks.

Joe.