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

[Aleksey Lim]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 11:11:24AM -0600, James Simmons wrote:
> 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.

something similar was already implemented in 0sugar
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Documentation_Team/Services/Activity_Developers_Guide#Using_services
but 0sugar tries to install(if PackageKit is installed) or download
required dependency and if nothing was useful just displays an error.
So what solution #2 from http://idea.olpcorps.net/drupal5/ideatorrent/idea/20/
is about.

> 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/):
> 

-- 
Aleksey