Sun to GPL Project Looking Glass

elleomea writes "According to The Register, Sun is releasing Project Looking Glass, their new GNU/Linux based 3D window managing system, under the GPL during their JavaOne conference (beginning today)." The screenshots of Looking Glass make it out to be very pretty. I'm not sure if I have the spare CPU cycles to power such an environment, but it's sure nice to drool over.

Comments

3D is Dead, Long Live SVG

[Tarantolato]

Looking Glass screenshots are fun to drool over and all I guess, but IMHO the way forward is not adding further complexity to the binary-graphics desktop.

Rather, it's SVG. XML-based vector graphics allow developers to parse and manipulate graphics the way you would a web page or a config file. They also make remoting applications even easier than with a binary protocol like X. What does this mean for end users? Not a whole terrible lot on the surface. But it does make it easier for developers to apply consistent look and feel with widely-known text munging tools and also make rich networked applications; so in the end there's a significant but non-apparent user benefit.

Of course the nature of SVG is such that although it looks extremely crisp and neat, it's basically 2D. I think the tradeoff is worth it.

If you're going to go for the extra overhead anyways, SVG is a much bigger win than 2D any day.