[josm-dev] New Yahoo plugin concept and its problems

[Francisco R. Santos]

The idea is the following: embed a Firefox inside JOSM to display a dynamic
background of Yahoo images, or better, an OpenLayers canvas with many layers
(Yahoo, Osmarender, Mapnik...)

Some time after coding the Yahoo plugin, I started investigating another
approach to the plugin, but didn't get to anywhere because of the immature
status of the libraries to be used. Recently, because of some problems
reported with this plugin (firefox window not closing in linux, and today
reported error with FF3), I revised the libraries to see if they are more
mature, and found that it may be usable [1]. There are several libraries
that can embed a browser in Java, but currently only two libraries that I
know are still supported and in development: SWT [2] and MozSwing [3].

The first one is the library used by the Eclipse project (from IBM), and is
heavily supported and developed.It supports native browsers (IE, FF,
Safari), but requires a big download per O.S.  The second one is a new
library, still under development, but very promising. Supports only FF, but
until some patches are included in the final FF branch, a big download (a
custom XUL Runtime) is also needed.

Anyway, I tried to create the plugin, but found a big problem: every
implementation uses an AWT component (heavyweight) for the browser, and so,
it does not integrate well with our Swing (lighweight) program. The current
JOSM Layer design only works with Swing components, since it provides a
Graphics object to paint on, but AWT components don't paint on them, they
paint directly on a native canvas. I tried to capture an image of the native
browser canvas and paint it on the Graphics object, but it is painfully
slow. One way I thought yesterday late was to code the browser not as a
plugin, but as a feature of JOSM itself, by adding a permanent layer below
every other layer in the MapFrame class with a JLayeredPane. However, I
haven't even tested if it could be done. Is the new JOSM-ng going to manage
layers the same way that current JOSM?

Other problem I found is that the AWT/Swing browser integration requires
Java 6 in some platforms (i.e. Linux), and even some glue library in MacOs.

Since I am not too skillfull with AWT/Swing problems, I'm now stuck. Has
anyone here worked with AWT/Swing integration problems?

Regards,
Quico

[1] http://wiki.netbeans.org/EmbeddedBrowser
[2] http://www.eclipse.org/swt/
[3] http://mozswing.mozdev.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/mozswing
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/josm-dev/attachments/20080312/31743ae6/attachment.html>