Re: AWT is dead now

[ks at micky dot rgv dot hp dot com]

> There has been a lot of discussion about AWT vs Swing design
> option, and I think that most people agree that Swing has two
> major advantages over AWT:
> 1) platform independence: you don't need to test thing on many
> platform, the code is the same, the bugs are the same, ...

This is the hazard of microsoft domination of the PC market for the
last ten years.  If it runs on one platform that covers 80% of the 
machines, it must be platform independent.

Take this clue.  Swing does not run on KVM.  Swing does not run on
Chai.  Swing does not run on IBM VM.  Swing does not run on Kaffe.
Swing does not run on jview.  Swing does not run on TowerJ.  

There are workarounds for some of these.  As long as Sun's licencing
for Swing/1.1 remains as it is you can distribute the swing jars with
your application, which would also work for gcj.  But the licensing 
was changed for JDK1.2, and as Kaffe, GCJ and others start adding 1.2
functionality, I don't think that Sun will hand them the rights to 
redistribute Swing without bringing along the rest of the JDK.

I'd like to see you use a swing based application from a system 360
on top of remote AWT though.  Molasses in winter comes to mind.

[...]
> 
> 4) if somebody really need it at that point, implementing
> AWT widgets by calling Swing code: I believe that it is (or
> was) Sun's plan too.
> 

What amazing hubris.  Who is implementing AWT on top of Swing supposed 
to help?

Cheers,
-kls