Symphonious

Rick Jelliffe holds the poor HTML support in swing up as an example of why Swing should be opensourced. There's a very major flaw in this argument though: you've been able to fix the HTML support in Swing since at least Java 1.3 and probably well before. It was actually designed to be replacable. Just implement your own HTMLDocument and HTMLEditorKit and you can plug it into a JTextPane all you like and render HTML to your heart's content.

So why hasn't it happened? Because everyone wants someone else to fix the problem. Rendering HTML is hard, it's a very complex standard and real-world usage makes it even more difficult. Opensourcing Swing won't make the task any easier and it won't suddenly bring a whole bunch of talented developers out of the woodwork that are happy to commit their time to fixing HTML support. If there were developers like that out there, they'd be working on Mustang right now - or more likely, would have been working on a replacement HTML renderer/editor for Swing way back.

Many companies have taken up this challenge, in the comments Patrick Wright mentions WebRenderer, the company I work for, Ephox, has written a better HTML editor based on the Swing text APIs and there are plenty of others out there.

Opensource isn't some magical solution to developing software - it doesn't make hard tasks suddenly simple, it doesn't suddenly get the whole world working for you to develop your every whim. Opensource has its advantages but it isn't the solution to a lack of developers to work on things. Even if you do get external developers working for free, you'll probably spend just as much time building and managing the community as you would have doing the work. Opensource is great, it provides a huge range of benefits, just don't expect it to magically do your work for you.

Jensen Harris has a post about how they tested out removing the ability to double click in the left corner of a window to close it, but that people couldn't get used to it so they're putting it back. Might I suggest that people didn't get used to it mostly because Office was the only application that didn't allow it?

If you want to really test out whether or not people could retrain themselves (and they can, even if they complain about having to) you'd need to remove the functionality from all the windows, not just a few of them. Otherwise, the other windows preserve the user's habits and it just becomes really frustrating that the interface is inconsistent.

Whether or not you should be able to close windows by double clicking the top left corner isnt' really important, what matters is that the interface behaves consistently and doesn't surprise users.

So apparently one of our engineers here at Ephox has been secretly writing a blog and not telling us.

I’m not ready to start advertising the existance of this blog to anyone and everyone I know. I’ll do my best to start posting on impulse though, it should make this whole process easier.

Either way I’m going to try and work on actually getting back into blogging this time, it can’t be too much longer before my workmates discover that I have a blog, hopefully by then I’ve found my style!

Well hope you've got it worked out Andy because you invoked the magic E word and turned up in my Ephox watch RSS feed.

So for all those that know Andy and didn't know he had or blog or just for those Ephox engineer groupies I'm sure hang out around here, go subscribe to Andy's blog.