[brailleblaster] More Thoughts
- From: "John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: brailleblaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 01:30:57 -0600
The core of BrailleBlaster IS in C. It is liblouis and liblouisutdml.
The latter will eventually be a complete braille transcription engine,
capable of doing whatever a place like APH or NBP wants. It is already
being used for production in Europe. It was written as a library so it
could be used in any nuumber of applications. In my view, BrailleBlaster
is just one of those applications. I like to say that
liblouis-liblouisutdml is the engine and BrailleBlaster is the rest of
the car. You can put the same engine in many different makes of car, but
an engine doesn't go anywhere by itself.
BrailleBlaster IS the UI. Any high-level language would require a
runtime environment. Alex is the only one who is talking about bundling
JREs. I think most users would already have one for their machine. If
not, the installer could fetch an appropriate one.
The pure Java code is platform-independent and does not have to be
recompiled. Only the native libraries must be compiled for the p0latform
and the architecture.
From what I've been hearing, computing is moving into the "cloud." That
is why using the SWT browser control is of interest.
BrailleBlaster was never intended to run on embedded devices. Even
liblouisutdml would probably be too big for them. Some are already using
liblouis.
I don't think that there would be much difficulty with BrailleBlaster on
Linux. There is a gtk versionn of SWT and probably others.
Quite frankly, I've been working on the Java code because nobody else
is. I want a good car to put my enginne into. I would rather concentrate
on the engine.
If somebody wants to put it into a different car that is fine. I just
think that BrailleBlaster with Java is the best bet for building a
driveable car.
John
--
John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
Abilitiessoft, Inc.
http://www.abilitiessoft.com
Madison, Wisconsin USA
Developing software for people with disabilities
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