SarynPaint: a Java program packaged for the OLPC

[Ben Wiley Sittler]

I think maintaining two parallel versions of the code in two languages
would be a huge waste of effort for me, but if someone else wants to
they are of course welcome to.

I have neither time nor inclination to port it merely to work around
the historical accident of Java not having been Open Source at the
time Sugar was initially developed. Also, I think the UI of this
program is actually more friendly to very young children by *not*
being more Sugarized — there's no confusing Frame when they
(inevitably) move the pointer to the edges of the screen, and since it
doesn't (yet) have save support or text input there's really no reason
for a toolbar or Journal integration. Mind you, minimal save/resume
support might be nice to have on all platforms someday.

On 2009-08-29, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> Hi Ben,
>
> On 29 Aug 2009, at 18:24, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote:
>
>> I think, then, that I would rather just ship it as an activity bundle
>> for "Sugar+Java or Sugar+OpenJDK", since the versioning issues (which
>> OpenJDK version should I use, exactly?), licensing issues (GPLv2 &
>> GPLv2+classpath-exception for OpenJDK vs. GPLv3 for SarynPaint,)
>> packaging unknowns (how does one run OpenJDK from a subdirectory,
>> exactly?), and bloat make bundling a JRE inside the .xo ridiculously
>> impractical. I'm halfway tempted to try to subset OpenJDK for this (to
>> reduce bloat), but that seems like an even bigger nightmare.
>
> Sorry if this is a controversial comment, but would you considered
> porting the code to Python? It looks like a nice starter chunk of code
> for someone interested in Python and or Sugar Activities.
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>