Guts Road Map

http://kenai.com/projects/guts/lists/development/archive/2010-10/message/143

The question may be hard, but the answer is easy (at least talking for myself): no, we shouldn't drop guts and that's not my intention. All technologies, even the latest ones, just like human beings, are programmed to die some day. For technologies, their life is much shorter than for human beings (on average), does that mean, that we should not starting using a technology, building upon it, just because it's going to disappear one day for sure? I don't think so.

As I said, I don't believe Swing's death is for tomorrow. Sun, then Oracle, have wanted to replace it with something brand new JavaFX. Sun has totally failed, after 3 years. Oracle will take many more years until being able to produce a full-fledged equivalent to Swing, and I guess that will be strongly linked with future evolutions of the Java language itself, probably Java 8 will be necessary to get the most out of JFX when it is ready.

In the meantime, enterprises still need to build business desktop applications, and Swing has always proven good for the job, despite its tough learning curve and its lack of structure for developing real-life applications. This is where Guts can come in handy; being an optimist (not always but here, yes) I think Guts could potentially help maintaining or increasing Swing usage in the enterprise (and also on other end-consumers applications). Anyway, yntil all companies completely switch to JFX, it will be quite a while, at least 4-5 years.

As long as I do have time for open source (and I have always arranged for enough time when needed), I will be committed to this project, because I like it. In my IT skills improvement process, nothing can replace what I am doing in open source projects, Guts in particular: API definition, corner cases handling, design discussions (sometimes passionate), sharing ideas for better way to implement things...

All this work makes me stronger in the area of API design and GUI design (and not just in Swing, most GUI toolkits are based on the same foundations). This can be helpful in any future IT project, even if this not a Swing GUI.

I thought Kevin had already depicted here, in one mail a couple of weeks ago, Guts developers would become famous and they would be asked their opinion about everything, due to their incredible wisdom ;-)

Seriously, I think we can bring a lot in Guts, in particular in providing developers with easier ways and novative approaches to building GUIs with Swing.

I would like to have a release before the end of the year, including everything we are discussing currently, in particular the "templating" mechanism, the libraries to help implement MVC (MVP, whatever design you like for GUIs).

If everything is fine, we will soon (a few weeks?) be able to have a first release (not complete but good enough).

Also, my idea with Guts is to redevelop my HiveBoard project with Guice/Guts but trying to ensure Guts can provide as much support as possible so as to limit the "HiveBoard" (how should I call it then, "GutsBoard"?) develop effort to a minimum.

Hope this helps clarifying my position.

JF