Re: XAWT: First useable (visible) results...

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Clemens Eisserer wrote:

> @Per Bothner: Even using GTK as underlaying layer for GTK doesnt help to 
> make apps look like native.

It does if you're running on Gnome.  As Gtk/Gnome is the preferred GNU
GUI framework, it is the first priority for GCJ, a GNU project.  Running
GCJ applications on Windows (say) is valuable, but is not the primary
goal of the GCJ project - though of course we welcome help from people
for whom it *is* the primary focus!

> Because AWT only has few widgets and all modern java-toolkits are 
> lightweight.

Not quite.  SWT uses native widgets when it can, and there are good
reasons for doing so.  Why try to emulate Gnome look-and-feel when
you can get it correctly and easily by using the Gnome libraries?

> I´m sure someday there also will be a free SWING 
> implementation - there are already many other free lightweight-tolkits - 
> awt-widgets will be obsolete. Then GTK will only be a layer which will 
> slow down drawing.

Whatever overhead might be caused by using Gtk instead of Xlib
directly is uninteresting on modern PC-class machines.
In fact, it is quite possible that using Gtk will be faster, even
ignoring issues of whether Java is as fast as C, just because more
people are working on Gtk performance than are likely to work on
AWT-for-GCJ-on-Xlib performance.

The value of AWT-for-GCJ-on-Xlib is for limited-memory limited-CPU
devices, but for a GNU/Linux desktop running Gnome on a modern
PC-class machine I believe AWT-on-Gtk would be better.  If nothing
else, it's more mature.

However, I don't want to discourage you from AWT-on-Xlib.  It is
useful (even if I don't think it is *as* useful), and your results
so far are encouraging!
--
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/