Re: AWT

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

Nathan Meyers <nmeyers@teleport.com> writes:
> I'm very suspicious of the performance claims of all lightweight
> toolkits, even without the overwhelming counterexample provided by
> Swing. They do the same work on the X client side that would otherwise
> be performed by the X server

I don't see how lightweight vs heavyweight necessarily makes much
difference the balance of work between the client/server nor in
the network traffic.

In the context of Java toolkits, my understanding is that "lightweight"
means that the Java toolkit does most of the drawing, rather than
delegating it to an lower-level toolkit (such as Motif or the Windows
API).  "Heavyweight" means that the widget uses "native" widgets -
i.e. it delegates drawing to some lower-level toolkit.  But the
lower-level toolkit still has to invoke a lot of low-level drawing
operations.  The X protocol does not provide "widgets";  they are
a pure library thing.  (There is an implementation issue how many
X server windows a toolkit uses, sometimes referred to the gadget
vs widget distinction, which a gadget is a logical widget that
does not correspond to an actual window the server knows about.
But that is again not inherently a propery of lightweight vs
heavyweight toolkits.)
-- 
	--Per Bothner
bothner@pacbell.net  per@bothner.com   http://home.pacbell.net/bothner/