Re: AWT

["Thomas Reilly" <treilly@allaire.com>]

Lincoln Spiteri <lincoln.spiteri@st.com> writes:

> I think another possibility would be to get the minimum AWT required to run
> Swing apps. I belive that these need very little peer widgets. Would using
> Swing have any license implications?

This is pretty much what Kaffe did, I believe, except they used Xlib
instead of glib.  Glib is nice because it is widely ported (including
win32).  GTK+ inherits this portability so its obvious GLIB or GTK+
are the right libraries.

The question is whether to do a lightweight GLIB or heavyweight GTK+.
I spoke briefly with Peter Mehlitz (sp?) at JavaOne (he did Kaffe's
AWT) and he said their lightweight implementation made swing apps run
faster than on your typical Sun JDK.  I can't remember exactly why, I
don't see why you couldn't have a heavyweight peer model along side a
fast lightweight model.  Maybe their lightweight implementation is
just more efficient.

I'm not sure the heavyweight vs lightweight debate affects gcj too
much.  Its all native code so I don't think there will be too much
difference.  Using GTK+ heavyweights gets you themes, which are nice.

--
Tom Reilly
Allaire Corp.
http://www.allaire.com