SWT and AWT

Mon Nov 24 15:22:00 GMT 2003

Andrew Haley wrote:
>We do use SWT. However, we need AWT for projects that already use it.
>>A bit of a misunderstanding. I was talking of using SWT as the parent 
to AWT. So a AWT button would be nothing but a thin layer over a SWT 
button. Last I looked the AWT support in gcj was just some Motif 
classes. The SWT people have already done the work of porting for the 
various windowing systems. GCJ could gain multiplatform AWT without 
writing native code to do it.
>There would be no sense in incorporating the SWT sources with libgcj;
>besides which, the licences may not be compatible.
>>>SWT falls under CPL (Common Public License) which states that it cannot 
be rolled with a GPL program without their permission. I don't see that 
happening. So your right in that you cannot include the SWT source code 
in the GCJ tree. But the question is, do you need the source with GCJ? 
If you were compiling the GCJ AWT/Swing classes you would but there is 
nothing stopping someone from downloading these from Eclipse separate 
from GCJ. Programmers would only have to ensure they have the swt jar 
file and shared lib if they were creating a AWT/SWT/Swing application.
This is straying down a very touchy subject. Most open source projects 
don't want dependencies to projects that fall under a different open 
source license. This is understandable and I wont waste time arguing 
against it. Creating a thin layer over SWT to get AWT is interesting 
but is still a lot of work. What would be real sweet is a SWT project 
under GCJ that uses CNI instead of JNI and fits with its license. 
Thats even more work....