Re: Swing replacements

[Ted Byers <r dot ted dot byers at rogers dot com>]

--- geodejerry@jeffnet.org wrote:
> Pardon my intrusion, I suspect that you are not the
> right 
> people to ask, but I'm hoping that you might know
> whom I 
> _should_ be asking. 
> 
If you have questions about licensing and distribution
of Sun's JRE, go straight to Sun's site and ask in
their most relevant forum.

> In an Excelsior article by Dmitry Leskov on
> converting Java 
> code to a Windows .exe file, (or maybe on a page I
> reached 
> from that page), I read that while the basic Java
> classes 
> _can_ be packaged as a .exe, Java does not allow its
> awt or 
> Swing classes to be so packaged (I hope I've got
> this right).
> 
Don't know.  Haven't tried.  But who cares?  You can
make an executable jar file easy enough.  Why would it
matter whether the file extension is 'exe' or 'jar'. 
I have downloaded quite a number of executable jar
files that were perfectly adequate little
applications.

I really don't understand why this would be an issue
for you.  Anyone and everyone can download the latest
JRE from Sun's site, and it seems to me Sun has gone
out of their way to make use and distribution of it
easy.  Just look at web start, as an example.  If you
are distributing your stuff through the web, you can
use web start to do so and guarantee that the person
downloading your software has the right version of the
JRE.  Sun has provided nice and simple documentation
for how to do this.

Mind you, I use gcc only for fortran and C++ (and
eventually I'll use it to learn ada - and maybe it is
blasphemous to say so here, but I use NetBeans and
Sun's SDK/J2EE for all my java development work), but
I DO know that gcc includes java, and I can't see that
being of much use if there wasn't an application
framework like Swing, or perhaps Swing itself.  And
I'd assume it supports making executables.  It would
be pretty useless otherwise.  Read the documentation
for java as provided with gcc.  It ought to tell you
all you need to know.

> I have a stand-alone, non-Web-based app. that I'd
> like to 
> distribute as a .exe with some database files, to a
> layman 
> audience, and I'd like to avoid issues of JRE
> distribution and 
> compatibility, etc. So I'm hoping someone,
> somewhere, has 
> written a replacement framework for Java's GUI
> classes. Can 
> you by any chance point me in such a direction?
> 
Compatibility is a completely different issue, and has
plagued software developers for decades.  I have new
java code that won't run on anything older than the
most recent JRE.  There are interesting things
happening with Java, such as the introduction of
generics, so I don't care if older versions of the JRE
don't like my new code.  

If you don't like Swing, look at SWT
(http://www.eclipse.org/swt/).

HTH

Ted