Re: Swing and other free GUIs (KDE?)
--- "E.L. Willighagen" <egonw@sci.kun.nl> wrote:
> I was wondering though... Is Swing the only GUI available? That is, are there
>
> alternatives? There is AWT ofcourse, but I nevered used that, because Swing
> looked so much better...
No. But Swing is the one that's most widely used, as it's already part of the
JDK.
> What about the KDE bindings? (Are there Gnome bindings too?) Is there a
> Debian
> package that uses the KDE bindings for Java, and have KDE provide the GUI
> stuff? Could that be an alternative to build truely free Debian Java GUI
> programs?
Yes, there are Java binding for different graphical toolkits. Google finds them
all ;) In fact, through JNI, which is part of a JVM, you can call pretty much
any native library, graphical or not.
But that doesn't matter for existing java applications, unless you want to go
ahead and rewrite their GUIs for some particular native toolkit. That means
your former cross-platform Java program is now bound to the platforms where a
port of the native toolkit exists, and that's not always desirable for the
upstream.
In my opinion, a pure java, liberally licensed, free software, swing
implementation would be preferable to native-toolkit based swing
implementations. The hypothetical [1] native speed advantage is not as
important as cross-platform/cross-vm deplayability of Swing apps to me.
cheers,
dalibor topic
[1] I'm not aware of anyone, commercial or free, who has managed to write a
Swing wrapper around a native graphical toolkit. So any claims of a speed
advantage by implementing Swing in native code are purely hypothetical.
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
http://search.yahoo.com
Reply to: