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

[James Simmons]

Aleksey,

My thought was that we could include the JRE in SoaS and in Sugar on
the XO 1.5 but other than that provide no support for creating
Activities in Java.  Sort of like we do with Gnash.  You could write a
limited sort of Activity in Flash using hulahop and that subset of
Flash that Gnash supports, but it isn't something we encourage.

Maybe the one thing we do is provide some way in activity.info to
specify that the Activity runs a Java applet.  At startup we could
check for the existence of the JRE and if it isn't found display a
message.

I totally agree that bundling a JRE inside an Activity doesn't make sense.

The problem I see with using Java to create Activities is that
developers would want to rewrite as little as possible.  You would
have Swing programs with that ugly theme Sun gives by default posing
as Activities.  Even if you provided a Swing theme that looked like
Sugar components (not a trivial undertaking) the Java programs would
still look different from everything else.  One of the strong points
of Activities now is the consistent look and feel they all have.
Supporting Java for more than just applets would undermine that.

James Simmons


On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> 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/):