Re: Scala UI futures

Ingo Maier wrote:

Jonathan, we have chosen to support Swing since we wanted to have a UI framework with a Scala-esque API that is usable right now.

Before we started the wrapper, I have been developing a scene graph-based framework that uses concepts from functional reactive programming (FRP) instead of listeners. This even goes beyond what JavaFX supports today. Unfortunately, I have been slowed down by various things lately. While the FRP layer is much more stable than before, the UI still needs a lot of work. I do realize that this is not something I will be able to continue on my own, hence my focus for the rest of year will be to bring it to a state where I can open up the code and others will be able to participate in its development. It is a pretty ambitious project though, and I can't say when and how experimental it will be.

On a side note, the Java platform right now lacks a lot of things for modern UIs, such as cross platform, efficient graphics hardware support that is exposed in public APIs as well as modern media APIs. I really do hope this will change in the future, but as of now, we have to do a lot of things on our own. I am also looking forward to Scala on MSIL, since it seems to be a better platform for graphics related things, but again, unfortunately not cross platform.

Wouldn't a wrapper on JavaFX solve many of these issues, such as cross-platform media codecs?

Scala + Silverlight is an interesting idea. I thought Scala had dropped .NET support. If .NET will eventually become a first-class platform (with tail calls!) then in the meantime maybe a JVM/.NET bridge could be used to access Silverlight.

Jonathan