Re: status of swing?
On Sun, 2005-03-04 at 17:14 -0400, Paul Galbraith wrote:
> I tried running one of the stock swing demos ("FileChooserDemo") from
> Sun's jdk 1.2, and to my pleasant surprise it started up without a hitch
> using sablevm and kaffe. It doesn't look the same as it does when
> running with the sun jvm, however.
Thank you for trying out SableVM. :)
> I'm brand new to using any of the free java options available out
> there...can anyone offer up an explanation of why the app looks
> different...I'd imagine that it's the swing classes, but maybe could be
> the awt implementation as well?
Sun's AWT and therefore Swing are implemented in "pure java" (how pure,
I cannot say w/o looking at Sun's sources, which, due to legal reasons
I won't do). They have their completly "own" look&feel. Basically
Sun wrote their toolking from scratch to their likening. This has
at least two side effects people usually don't like:
1. it's quite slow (you really *have to* have an optimiznig JIT to
get a reasonable speed)
2. it does not integrate its look&feel with your desktop (altough
there's some improvement in java 1.5 IIRC)
On the other hand SableVM's and Kaffe's class library, which are both
derivatives of GNU Classpath, use GTK+ toolkit as the basis for the
AWT and Swing implementation. This quite nicely gets rid of the two
problems mentioned above, but of course it looks "different" from
Sun's toolkit.
I'd say that unless the functionality of a program while using a non-Sun
class library is the same as with Sun's class libs, then it's all right.
OTOH as you try more programs you'll find out that there's still plenty
of unimplemented features and bugs, but there are folks (at RedHat
mainly) who are paid to get rid of these, so it's constantly getting
better.
Cheers,
Grzegorz B. Prokopski
--
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <gadek@sablevm.org>
SableVM - Free, LGPL'ed Java VM http://sablevm.org
Why SableVM ?!? http://sablevm.org/wiki/Features
Debian GNU/Linux - the Free OS http://www.debian.org
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