Slawomir Czerwinski
on
I started Glimpse 5 years ago, as an attempt to simplify the use of OpenGL. The very first version was written in Java, and it provided a unified object-oriented interface for both Android and desktop Swing applications.
While Kotlin was becoming more and more popular, I decided to rewrite the entire Glimpse codebase in the new language, using a mixed OOP and FP approach. The attempt was much nicer to use, yet still art for art’s sake in many ways.
I had too many plans for improvements and further development of the project, and… for the next 4 years, I didn’t touch Glimpse at all. Maybe because I didn’t have time, maybe because I didn’t need it at the moment, and maybe because I didn’t really believe any of my ideas on how to proceed was actually good.
So why did I “resurrect” the project now?
I’ve been working on Glimpse over the last few months, although you will not see any commits in the repository until recently. I developed it as a part of another project, and that allowed me to take a more pragmatic approach to the library. I got rid of a lot of fancy code, and replaced it with what actually worked, and was useful.
I’ve also been looking into some new technologies that helped me better organise my code, and made some elements of the library obsolete. To mention just a few:
- Glimpse is now a Kotlin multiplatform project, maintained in a single GitHub repository.
- I replaced Travis CI with much more powerful GitHub Actions, so I can focus on the coding instead of maintaining releases and documentation.
- Thanks to Jetpack Compose on Android and Compose for Desktop, a bleeding edge library from Jetbrains, there is no need for building a UI framework from scratch.
I’m pretty confident, I’m finally going in the right direction. I can already see first stable release of Glimpse on the horizon.