Re: AWT

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

Nathan Meyers <nmeyers@teleport.com> writes:

> Jeff has it right: "heavyweight" means there's a window being used in
> the native system, "lightweight" means the window is entirely virtual
> and exists only in the mind of the X client.

Er, this may be how *you* define heavyweight/lightweight,
and they may be *attributes* of heavyweight/lightweight as
implemented on X, but they are clearly not defining properties
of heavyweight/lightweight when we are talking about Java
- most Java implementation do not use an "X client".

(Note *all* windows are virtual - as far as I know very few X servers
can allocate specific hardware to windows.)

The defining property of heavyweight/lightweight is whether there
is a Peer associated with the component.  Period.  Whether there
is an X window associated with the Peer is an implementation
issue.

> Say you've got a text field in the middle of your GUI for which you want
> a different mouse cursor than the rest of the GUI: the mouse becomes a
> text cursor when it enters and a default cursor when it leaves. ...
> How does a lightweight toolkit do it? It has to track all mouse movement
> in the application.

Clearly, a pure lightweight approach is inefficient in this case.
(Though how much does it matter these days?)  But Swing was restricted
to being Pure Java.  If we re-implement Swing, we could use native
X windows where it makes sense.

I don't think we're disagreeing on implementation issues;  the main
disagreement is on terminology.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
bothner@pacbell.net  per@bothner.com   http://home.pacbell.net/bothner/