[jsword-devel] Alkitab Bible Study 0.9 released

[DM Smith]

webmedic wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 11:32 AM, DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:dmsmith555 at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     To really get Java to shine with RTL, you will need to ditch Swing.
>     (BD still uses Swing.) Swing has poor bidi algorithm and rtl
>     rendering. It's handling of joiners in fonts is poor also.
>
>     Our plan for BD is to use an embedded browser. Ideally it would be the
>     same on all platforms (e.g. Mozilla's xulRunner or WebKit), but we may
>     end up with IE for windows, xulRunner for Linux and WebKit for Mac.
>
>
> I know that it may not be desirable but JRE 6 beta 10 if I remember 
> correctly has webkit built in now.
>
> So it will be much easier to use webkit but will require 6.10 when it 
> comes out.

That's cool. I'll look into it.

The only problem for us is that Mac does not have Java 6 for PPC or Dual 
Core (only Core 2 Duo and only for Leopard). Our stance on backward 
compatibility, prevents us from going past Java 1.4.2 (Tiger's highest) 
for a bit longer.

The basic idea was to support the current and previous OS for Windows, 
Linux and Mac. But that is a complicated picture now.

Users are skipping Vista. So do we count it? (Fortunately, Java 5 works 
for Win98+, but Java 6 is limited to XP+).

On the Mac, hardware now enters the picture. IMHO, 4 year old hardware 
should not be abandoned. My Mac Mini (early 2006), is core duo and 
cannot run Java 6.

Linux is easy. Use the latest!

We may have a number of minor releases before we release 
BookMarks/Personal Commentary/... for the major Elephant release. My 
take is thenBD will have all the fundamental features that anyone will 
want. After that, we'll work on a new UI with the browser change and it 
will require the latest and greatest version of java for each platform, 
hopefully Java 6.10+.

In Him,
    DM