Re: AWT

[Nathan Meyers <nmeyers@teleport.com>]

Thomas Reilly wrote:
> I followed the link someone posted and found Sun's 3 reasons for using
> lightweights:
> 
>    1.Native windows can be heavyweight, so it's undesirable to have too many of them.
> 
> Doesn't see to be right.  I use this plotting tool called xmgr that
> uses tons of Motif widgets and has never seemed sluggish.  My
> impression with GTK+ apps is that they are even more snappy than Motif
> so I think we can safely say this point isn't valid.

Agreed. And, yes, most toolkits are snappier than Motif because they
weren't built on top of the X Toolkit.


>    2.Native windows are opaque, so they can't be used to implement transparent regions.
> 
> This wouldn't seem to be super important.  Does anybody know if GTK+
> has support for this?  Doesn't the X11 Shape extension allow you to do
> all kinds of arbitrary clipping that could be used for transparency?

Yes and no. The shape extension gives you arbitrary-shaped windows that
can contain holes. X doesn't give you anything exactly like the glass
pane, a see-through window on which you can render.


>    3.Native windows are handled differently across platforms, so the AWT has to struggle to maintain a consistent view across these varied platforms.
> 
> Herein probably lies the true answer, they had a hard time porting
> everything and keeping the Windows and X11 implementations consistent.
> GTK+ pretty much rules out this one too.  And if platform consistency
> problems do crop up they can be fixed in GTK+.

I really wonder about this reason. It seems to me that raw native
windows instead of platform-specific GUIs could have enabled an awfully
good cross-platform toolkit without too many constraints (was the market
really screaming for the glass pane?). Instead, Sun opted for a
no-constraints design that rules out native-window implementation on any
platform.

Nathan