Roland Mas wrote:
> 
>   Hello guys,
> 
>   I'm just a poor Linux user who wishes he could use the brand-new and
> (apparently) greatly improved versions of POV-Ray. The problem is, the
> POV-Team seems to have a bit changed its opinion of porting POV-Ray:
> it seems that the panel of officially supported platforms tends to
> converge on the single Windows 95 version (maybe I'm a bit
> exaggerating here),...

Well, time for my $.02 here.

If a portable UI is what people would like, and one that could act like
the platform it is running on, or not, depending on the user's
preference, then I'd really suggest looking into JFC/Swing for Java.

I have some references listed from a presentation I made at the last
meeting of the OCJUG ( http://www.ocjug.org )

The list is at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/4453/jfcintro/jfcintro.html

In one of the articles at the Swing Connection, they even had a simple
example of how to extend the EditorKit to support colored Java syntax.
It's not a big stretch to change that to POV-Ray syntax and just drop it
in.


JFC has come out of Netscape collaborating with Sun to give Java a
better set of UI widgets, and they seem to be doing a pretty good job of
it. Yes, there are still a few issues with specific platforms, but that
is mainly on MS' VM. With the issues that I'm aware of, it is fairly
easy to write code to work around even those. Since the UI components
are all 100% pure Java and no longer dependent on platform OS peer
widgets, the whole thing is a huge step closer to the Java goal, and a
lot less "write once, debug everywhere".


Java's use has come up in the IMP, and I wrote a quick page summarizing
things. This was before my involvement with Swing, which has made me
like using it even more (and this not from a personal hacking viewpoint,
but from a "managers are breathing down our necks, lets get some quality
product cranked out" viewpoint). The write-up is at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/4453/imp/imp_java.htm
(I'll probably update it soon).


(BTW, for those interested I've worked in Java for servers running on
Linux before, and am now doing GUI client work in Java with Swing on
Windows, Solaris, Linux, etc. at my current job, so I've got a bit of
exposure to using it commercially.)

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