[IAEP] [POLL] Non Sugar Platform activities in Activity Library

[Aleksey Lim]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 02:59:54PM -0600, James Simmons wrote:
> Regarding Java, I have used and developed Java apps on hardware that
> is not much more powerful than the XO-1.  Given a choice between Java
> and Flash I'd rather have people developing in Java.  While 55 meg is
> a lot on the XO-1 on SoaS or the XO 1.5 it isn't that bad.

For one download yes, but every user will have to download 55M(when
activity itelsef takes only 5M) for every activity release, so for other
java based activities.

> I think
> the real question here is do we support creating "pure Java"
> Activities,

and geogebra would be first experience on that way

> and what benefit there would be to doing that.

I think this relates to core question that should be answered before any
sugar related doing (http://idea.olpcorps.net/drupal5/ideatorrent/idea/20/):

Should sugar be closed education environment with activities created(in
python) only for sugar or sugar provides programming languages agnostic
services (Journal, Collab oriented features) that could be used by
*existed* education applications (via tools like dbus etc.).

So, in my mind question "what benefit there would be to doing that"
turns to "what benefit sugar can provide for existed java based applications
and how make them useful".

> Much of
> the Java software we'd like to support might be in the form of
> applets.

geogebra could also work in applet

> We could certainly allow Browse to support applets without
> providing a pure Java Activity framework.  We could also distribute
> such applets in the form of Activities that use hulahop, like Social
> Calc and the Karma apps do.

unfortunately it doesn't change question about having java on targeted
box (if I understand right, jre should present anyway, moreover it makes
situation more complicated since we need to rely on having java browser
plugin on sugar boxes).

> I've programmed in Java for many years and I'd have to say that Java
> IDEs seem to be more powerful than Eric but I prefer Python as a
> language and a development platform.  My proposal would be to treat
> Java as a less objectionable alternative to Flash.  You would not be
> able to write a first class Activity in it, but you could create a
> non-collaborating applet run by hulahop and distribute it on ASLO.
> 
> James Simmons
> 
> 
> > Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:26:30 +0000
> > From: Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org>
> > Subject: [IAEP] [POLL] Non Sugar Platform activities in Activity
> >        Library
> > To: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
> > Cc: sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> > Message-ID: <20100228022630.GB17334 at antilopa-gnu>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
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-- 
Aleksey