Javalobby - Comments for "Plugging into Lobo's Pure Java Web Browser"

thanks articke.evden eve

kardelen133 — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:17:41 -0400

thanks articke.

FWIW: We’ve started a

stepheneb — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:37:25 -0500

FWIW: We've started a project called MozSwing:
* http://confluence.concord.org/display/MZSW/Home
that integrates v1.8.1.4 the Mozilla rendering framework XUL with the Java Swing GUI framework.

We've got working code on sourceforge:
* http://sf.net/projects/mozswing

MozSwing is triple-licensed: MPL 1.1, GPL 2.0, LGPL 2.1.

You can see it work by running this web start jnlp: http://jnlp.concord.org/dev/mozswing/mozswing.jnlp

Running that jnlp will also run an extension-installer jnlp that will install platform and os-specific XUL libraries in your web start cache.

There are obvious disadvantages to relying on a native libraries that have to be installed.

Some of the advantages to using the mozswing approach is that we have both rendering and scripting access from a Swing application to almost any XPCOM components (browser plugins) like Flash that can be embedded in a Mozilla browser.

We're planning on porting the mozswing code to v1.9 of XUL and XPCOM (same codebase that's used in Firefox 3).

I think that this is a very

im-james — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:59:19 -0500

I think that this is a very interesting project ... a very hard one. People immediately compare to the alternatives (IE or FF) and if your renderer is not as good as these, no one wants to use your software.

Jacek wrote:Java needs to

mknutty — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:05:47 -0500

Jacek wrote:

Java needs to get out of its "everything must be in Java" mindset and instead integrate better with whatever higher quality native components are availabe on each platform.

If they exist and are integratable. I've done plenty of what you are suggesting. It usually doesn't work that well.

Jacek wrote:

I'd rather see full official support for embedded Gecko with a Java-friendly API. This would be way more useful in the long run.

There is a project like this. It is dead.

Jacek wrote:

Swing could definitely learn a few tricks from SWT. I still wince every time I see all the rendering issues with Netbeans under Ubuntu (from fonts to control rendering).

Maybe. But SWT could learn some from Swing. Like making custom components easy to do.

It's not really easy to have

fabriziogiudici — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:38:26 -0500

It's not really easy to have a sound opinion on it. I personally like Lobo, that I've started using when it was called Cobra, at the time for a plugin of my application that should be able to display some web pages embedded in it, taken from real external websites (otherwise, if you are the producer of the HTML, you could better go for XHTML and use Flying Saucer). While at the beginnings I remember there were lot of problems in the rendering, Cobra/Lobo improved a lot. I've not tested it for some months now, since I've temporarily put the focus on other things to do. Is it better pure Java or a native Gecko integration? At the moment I can't answer. I'd prefer pure Java for the reason Geertjan talked of, mainly for the Security + Reliability (I still see some crashes in my Safari and Firefox browsers in certain cases, and I wouldn't like them to crash my application too). OTOH surely Gecko is a better option for rendering precision. But since there's no reason for which a Java browser can't become competitive, but for the fact of having a committed team of people working on it, in the end I think that it's a good thing that the Lobo guys are there. I'd wait more or less another year before understanding if a compliant Java browser is an option or not.

--Fabrizio Giudici

Jacek, I agree with you that

geertjan — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:31:58 -0500

Jacek, I agree with you that not everything must be in Java. However, on the other hand, I find these arguments from the Lobo page pretty convincing in this regard, under the heading "Why a Pure Java Browser?":

There are a number of advantages to be derived from a browser that is written in Java as opposed to a language compiled into native code, namely:

Security.- In principle, a Java program is less suceptible to certain types of vulnerabilities such as a buffer overflow attack. Java's security model can also allow web content to have access to a complex set of APIs, except in a controlled sandbox.
Extensibility.- A Java-based application can be extended via powerful cross-platform plugins. Consider the difference this has made for Java software such as jEdit and Eclipse. (Lobo already has a plugin API).
New paradigms.- With the help of Java we can implement new powerful cross-platform and secure mechanisms to represent web content. We would like to make it easy to integrate arbitrary UI languages into Lobo. We would also like to support JavaFX by default as a first-class citizen. But we also plan to allow, for example, representation of web content merely as Java source code.
Portability.- This is the obvious advantage of a pure Java application.

Forgive me for saying, but I

Jacek — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:20:25 -0500

Forgive me for saying, but I think this type of project is really not very useful.

Java needs to get out of its "everything must be in Java" mindset and instead integrate better with whatever higher quality native components are availabe on each platform.

I'd rather see full official support for embedded Gecko with a Java-friendly API. This would be way more useful in the long run.

Swing could definitely learn a few tricks from SWT. I still wince every time I see all the rendering issues with Netbeans under Ubuntu (from fonts to control rendering).

Javalobby - Comments for "Plugging into Lobo&#039;s Pure Java Web Browser"

thanks articke.evden eve

FWIW: We’ve started a

I think that this is a very

Jacek wrote:Java needs to

It's not really easy to have

Jacek, I agree with you that

Forgive me for saying, but I

Javalobby - Comments for "Plugging into Lobo's Pure Java Web Browser"