Roger Brinkley's Blog

JavaHelp's Emancipation

We are looking forward to the community driving the development. That said, it will be important to do that development within the JCP process. Specifically this means that small API changes can be made but larger changes will have to be made under a JSR. Changes not affecting APIs can be readily adopted in the open source project.

Note: JavaHelp is still available from java.sun.com under the same binary license. You can continue to use JavaHelp as always but now it's possible to include JavaHelp directly in your open source application.

There is no change to the JavaHelp forum and mailing lists.

Any questions...sent them to the mailing list.

Comments

• But *where* is the subversion repository?

  Posted by: pkeegan on November 13, 2006 at 10:22 AM

• https://javahelp.dev.java.net/svn/javahelp/trunk

  Posted by: jglick on November 13, 2006 at 07:01 PM

• It's great that JavaHelp has been open sourced, I wonder if there's a big itch in the open source community to update this project.

  Is there a roadmap / future direction for JavaHelp, maybe some JSRs that are yet to be implemented? Now everybody can get in and enhance the implementation, but as you mention, the JCP process has to be followed and I'm wondering what direction Sun was hoping to take JavaHelp in the future.

  One feature I'd like to see is a native HTML rendering component used instead of the current Java based one. You could do that without an API change, but of course it could break all kinds of compatibility (specially if mixing heavyweight and lightweight components).

  Posted by: augusto on November 14, 2006 at 05:33 PM

• The basic roadmap for the project is maintenance. As far as I'm concerned there isn't any new features that need to be added or have been communicated. As far as the native content viewer is concerned there is already an implementation that includes the JDIC native browser. Of course highlighting doesn't work but otherwise it's functional. And it doesn't break compatibility (other than the search highlighting

  There is a possibility of doing a contrib section. Code that is external to the distribution but that others might find useful.

  Posted by: brinkley on November 15, 2006 at 10:29 AM

• I know the netbeans folks will be happy. They've been hammered several times in the past for not being 100% free because they use javahelp as the IDE's help system.

  Posted by: richunger on November 15, 2006 at 12:33 PM

• thanks for doing this, it will make packaging netbeans easier.

  Posted by: robilad on November 15, 2006 at 06:39 PM

• If you want a simple suggestion as to what I would think be a good thing with java help, it would be to support docbook. Although I currently have no problem splitting up my docbook into the appropriate html chunks and what not. It'd be really nice to not have "prep" my help files before they can be used. Also pehaps a way to specify what the help widgets look like. Or even being able to display using the systems native help system. Perhaps a way to use other help systems files so that we don't have to rework the help text when we port a VB app to Java. That's why I'm happy that JH is now opensource.

  Posted by: jeremiah on November 16, 2006 at 07:21 AM

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