status of java2d-on-cairo

Thu Aug 28 16:19:00 GMT 2003

hi,
I wanted to let people know about the status of my native java2d work.
this is visual work and a picture tells at least 1024 words:
http://people.redhat.com/graydon/native-java2d-aug28-2003.png
that is not using any sun code, it's all free software. now some
qualifications:
- most of the rendering there is being done in GDK and cairo, a C
 library (http://www.cairographics.org), and not in java. subsequently 
 the structure of the work so far is not as open to tinkering on
 the java-side of the JNI as the java2d APIs might imply. 
- the text API of cairo is not complete, so there is no text rendering
 support yet. the dark gray box in that screenshot is the bounding
 box for some glyph-converted text (via pango), but I cannot render
 it. when rendering is available it will be through xft (or other
 low level backends, such as win32 GDI, as needed)
- several of the java2d drawing functions are a bit ambiguous in
 specification, so the way they work might not be what you expect.
 feel free to correct.
- several drawing functions are incomplete, either in my code or in
 cairo or both. many overloads in the Graphics2D object are missing,
 and a few cairo APIs are unfinished or missing. both are free
 software though, and can be fleshed out.
- the draw cycle supports conventional AWT offscreen Image-based
 double buffering, but sometimes this appears to play less than
 perfectly with the GDK event queue, and gets slightly jerky in its
 response to update requests. I don't know exactly how this is
 happening yet.
in total there's about 140k of code in 9 new files, plus a handful of
little patches around and about. I can post it to the list, or break
it up into lots of separate little patches, or post it to a URL for
reading.. whatever is preferred. comments?
-graydon