AWT is dead now

Mon Mar 20 22:13:00 GMT 2000

Cedric Berger wrote:
> Nobody uses AWT widgets anymore. I've never seen a new AWT
> application the last two years. In fact, Swing is widely recognized
> as the better GUI toolkit availabe today (and I'm not speaking of
> Java only). The main problem so far was speed, but JDK 1.3 is
> much better, and having the code compiled with a tool like GCJ
> will also make it much faster.

Definatly. Swing is a far superior toolkit to anything else I've ever seen.
Its weaknesses (apart from speed) are poor intergration with native
applications and poor integration between swing applications (eg cut &
paste, drag & drop, etc - although I think these are being remedied
somewhat in JDK 1.3). These are the things we'd be adressing with a "gcj
toolkit". I want to write native applications, but with a Swing API.
> IMHO, the right way to develop a graphic library for Java today
> is:
>> 1) implementing the basic (low level) AWT functionalities.
> Basically Window/Frame/Component/Container/Canvas and
> event handling.
>> 2) implementing Java2D (it's probably more difficult than 1),
> but it can be done later and its probably a lot of fun to do.

Yeah, whatever the long term plans, we've got to start somewhere.
Implementing an AWT 1.1 using gtk native peers that can run Sun's Swing 1.1
distribution is a reasonable goal in the short term.
regards
 [ bryce ]