Want to help integrating swing. Is already someone working on it?

Tue Mar 4 15:16:00 GMT 2003

Hi there!
> > I agree with you. We only can do that stuff lightweight.
> > But I would suggest to use existing libraries.
> > Whats about this option? 
> Sounds good, but what libraries are you aiming at? Cedric says Swing is
> based around AWT/Java2D only. So if we want to get anywhere we would
> have to get Java2D api's (from the jdk 1.2 specs to keep things small)
> working
O.K. I´ll keep it shorter now. Wrote the whole mail and then IE5.0 crashed. My friend has no Mozilla ;-((
As far as I know the AWT-Classes integrated in GCJ are almost complete and based on GTK.
This has the advantage that they also could be ported to Linux. Skins wont matter, we´ll draw line-by-line.
I did not spent much time in trying this, because with my setup, most samples compilied fine, but I got an runtime-error at startup. I think the native part was missing....
Again this was with 3.2 and a precompilied SuSE-binary, dont know if it will work in the 3.3-release. But at this list many peolpe said that it should work.
Most AWT-Classes should be complete, Java2d is mostly finished (~80%). I dont know exactly and I havent tried this I can only tell you what I´ve heard.
There´s also a project calles GNU-Classpath www.fsf.org/software/classpath . Many code from the GCJ was merged out of this library into libgcj. It has also a SWT/Java2d-implementation.
Java2d should be very complete in this library and they also start coding swing.
As far as I know SWING doesnt need any native calls, its completlywritten on top of AWT. Java2d also isnt based on native functions.
That means we could borrow missing features from GNU-Classpath and put it into LibGCJ.
And, because of SWING doesnt need native controls, we should consider working together with GNU-Classpath, making theyr current implementation (which is very poor but existing) compatible with the AWT of GCJ.
> > As I said before, I absolutly dont want to implement it heavy-wheight!
> > The questions is only now on what be build it.
> Any suggestion?? You seem to have looked at the widgets sets more than I
> have. I must admit I only did real gui stuff in Swing (and hacked AWT a
> bit), but never went into native (unless you consider win32).
>> We can't do it like java-gtk, because they do a 1-on-1 binding of GTK
> stuff, there shouldn't be any native api appearing into the final code.
>> > I dont want to use SWT, theres so much stuff to do.
> > On those bindings we could start with the funpart!!
> LOL :D ok. Let's start small ok??? Otherwise everything will get
> bloated, it would be a good idea not to any inlining ourselves in the
> code as you see in a lot of sources, it makes reading the code really
> hard. (just try to figure out within 10 secs what is happenining in
> java.io.ObjectStreamClass)
Thats right!
> My first hunch would be to implement the JWindow/JFrame thing bindings
> to some native widget set. But we only need a windowing toolkit without
> widgets and can disregard any themeing support because the eventual look
> and feel is going through pure java code. 
>> O o .
>> We have to do it from the start using Xlib and review the current code
> of Xlib in GCJ. I say drop the Gtk, Gtk2, Qt, Motif idea as a base.
>> What do you think of this? Where to start?
>> We would have to test the existing xlib code and get it working with
> GCJ. I didn't manage to get this working yet. Any ideas? 
>> I suggest starting really really really small, otherwise the project wil
> blow up, because nobody can keep track of what's happing, and do at most
> 1 or 2 things at a time, and document every single step we make; and no
> funny coding style doing hardcoded possibly not executed optimisations
> (yet).

Hmmm, I think first we should have a look at GCJ3.3 and should try AWT/Java2d with this.
We also should inform us at that list.
The second point is to look at GNU-Classpath, how compatible the two classpaths are.
Sorry, I have no time left at the moment. If you have some questions, please dont hastinate to ask!
Mfg Linuxhippy
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