Ibex (formerly XWT) and Vexi (Ibex Springoff) Alive and Merging?

Hello,

   allow me to repost the message from Adam Megacz titled 
"Reintegration". Adam writes:

   So, Tupshin and I had a great discussion last Friday on reintegrating 
Vexi and Ibex.  I mentioned that grid layout and SVG would pose 
problems, but I realize now that it's no harder than getting sane layout 
with SVG in the first place -- which is still an unresolved problem.

I'm going to try to update the Ibex reference to reflect how far I've 
gotten with it.  At the moment, here are some of the issues.  Note that 
with SVG, the actual contour of a "box" isn't necessarily rectangular -- 
the path itself is the outline of the box.  Another way of looking at it 
is that "pre-svg boxes" are just paths that happen to be rectangular.

I began the SVG project keeping the notion that boxes were rectangular, 
and that paths were drawn "inside" boxes, but this quickly gets way too 
confusing -- for example, transforms warp the path, but not the 
"invisible rectangle" around the outside.  Plus, it's generally what the 
user sees that you want to "pack against".

The main issue that arises is whether or not to maintain the aspect 
ratio when expanding a box/path to fill its parent.

  - If you do maintain the aspect ratio, you lose the current behavior 
where a box's horizontal and vertical expansion don't affect each other.

  - If you don't maintain aspect ratio, then expansion is an 
underconstrained problem -- think of a square rotated 30 degrees
    expanding inside another square.  You can have a long-skinny or 
short-fat expansion, and neither is obviously superior to the other.

The answer is probably to let the user either fix an aspect ratio or 
leave it unconstrained.  Setting meaningful defaults will require care.

I'm also not sure that a lot of the stuff in grid layouts "makes sense" 
if boxes aren't rectangular.  I guess for the time being, we can just 
tell people not to expect things to work right if you use grids with 
nonrectangular boxes (ie either use grids with rectangular boxes or 
single-row/column layout with nonrectangular boxes).

Lastly, I need to warn people that SVG support requires deep, deep 
changes to the overall API.  Now would be a good time to start adjusting 
to the fact that backward compatability is going away ;)

This email was sort of disorganized; I'll try to write something clearer 
soon...

Also, my friend Marc drew this for me:

  http://www.megacz.com/tmp/mascot.jpeg

  - a
 
  Source: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.vexi.core/322

   If anyone has any further information or news on the state of Ibex or 
Vexi, let us know.

   - Gerald



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