On 17 Dec 2013, at 15:22, Mickael Istria <mistria@redhat.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Many of us have identified a major bug leading to Eclipse crash when using JBT 4.2.0.Alpha1 and Eclipse Luna. https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-16280 , https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-16308 , https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-16290 .
Xulrunner binaries we have don't work on GTK3 (which is next Eclipse default implementation for SWT on Linux). Apparently there is no xulrunner available which works with GTK3, and anyway, the dependency on discontinued JavaXPCom seems to show that it's impossible to find a set of compatible SWT/GTK3/XulRunner/JavaXPCom libraries that can work together.
This makes that currently, we don't have any way to get XulRunner and VPE working on Linux. They currently crash the workbench, but even if we workaround that (by checking the gtk version used and avoid invoking xulrunner when using GTK3) we can't have this feature working.

What do we do from here?

Curses native code and how it always ends up hurting us ? :)

It seems like the recommended way (from old messages on JavaXPCom list) is to use WebKitGTK+ on Linux instead of xulrunner. For more uniformity, it would require to get rid of xulrunner for other OS and rely fully on Webkit and a Java binding such as webkit driver.

Konstantin, Ilya and Denis is and have been working on using JavaFX Webview (based on webkit) as a replacement for xulrunner.

Been discussed in various Jiras, confcalls and face-2-face meetings.

We should know something soon on feasibility of it.

Is this a right path to follow? If yes, this should be started very soon, except if we prefer dropping the whole VPE in favour of something else.

I don’t understand what the difference is between this path and “dropping the whole of VPE in favour of something else” ?

/max