Re: Swing and other free GUIs (KDE?)
On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, E.L. Willighagen 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...
Swing builds on top of AWT AFAIK.
There's also SWT from IBM which is used in the Eclipse-IDE. This is a
hybrid between the two far ends used by AWT and Swing. It uses the native
interface where available and implements the missing features. It works
via the JNI. On Linux it uses GTK+ for the gui-libs.
> What about the KDE bindings? (Are there Gnome bindings too?) Is there a Debian
I don't know about any KDE-bindings, but I do know there're Gnom-bindings.
There's even a deb: java-gnome. These bindings also contain gtk-bindings
and these should be usable without pulling in all of the gnome-related
things. I've heard that Sun is supporting development of these bindings.
> 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?
I don't think it's that easy. If an app is using the swing-interface you
have to have a lib with exactly that interface to be able to use it.
What could be possible is to use a mature gui-lib, like gtk or qt, and
write a wrapper that translates the swing api-calls into, i.e., gtk-calls.
I imagine the classpath people are either following this path or
implementing it 'for real' because swing-calls can't be mapped to
gtk-calls in an easy way.
A classpath-swing package is, I think, the prefered way to get free apps
using swing for a gui from contrib into main. They've got the framework
and some parts of the implementation ready so it's likely the fastest
path to a fully functional free swing; apart from Sun relicensing the
whole bunch.
regards,
Thomas
--
- I love defenceless animals, especially in a good gravy
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