[proposal] drawing library for designers

[John Lee]

hi,

guys in OM have been thinking about the possibility of a drawing
library that is easy to use even to the non-professionals.  afaik,
there are many similar libraries/frameworks in FOSS already, but none
of them seem to match exactly what we need here.

the example we're looking at is 'Processing'.  it's a rather rich
library based on java.  (processing.org) i have worked on it a few
months ago but no success.  the main problem is that it's based on
java.  python is the language we have in mind here, and it's hard to
make the whole cacao(jvm) + classpath + gtk + cairo stack fast enough
for graphics on neo.

if one looks into the api of processing, he will see it's quite
different from gtk, qt, efl, etc.  gtk and qt are widget toolkits, efl
might be closer but doesn't cover all the functions of it.

so, i propose we port the processing 2D api to python.  the api itself
is in a way quite similar to cairo, so i think it will be better if we
implement the prototype based on pycairo.  then, we can go from there
to replace the slow part in C or maybe even some hacks to go around
cairo and talk to X directly.

in order to prevent reinventing the wheels, if there are already
something similar out there, please let me know.


Regards,
John Lee


p.s. it's possible to use python or ruby with processing by the java
implementation of these languages, namely jruby and jython.  however
it's going to be even slower then using processing directly (in java)
so these are not the options.