Re: Want to help integrating swing. Is already someone working onit?

[Terry Sikes <tsikes at cox dot net>]

Dhek Bhun Kho wrote:

> Regarding the message you posted before: SWT doesn't provide any drawing
> operations except for drawing lines and bitmaps? I would like to know
> just what possibilities there are. I've never worked with OpenGL, but
> could it interoperate with SWT so SWT would handle the events and OpenGL
> would do the drawing?
Hi Bhun. I don't know if I'd be too interested in a "Swing on top of 
SWT" toolkit at this point, but I think an SWT port completely done in 
OpenGL would be VERY interesting. I know the SWT folks have mentioned 
this, but I'm not sure its going anywhere with them at this point (I 
guess I should check again). All of the widgets would have to be written 
from the ground up, but they could have special OpenGL visual effects 
(alpha, 3D effects) and they would (of course) seamlessly blend with the 
OpenGL canvas. For instance, you could have a fullscreen OpenGL game 
that "grew" GUI elements around the edges on a keypress, and then went 
fullscreen on the next keypress. You could also run the programs in a 
window, just as with any other windowed application.

There are probably some rough edges, I think font handling could be 
improved for instance (OSS cross fertilization?). Also, on many consumer 
OGL cards some 2D stuff is pretty slow, but there are workarounds. On 
pro cards and workstations, everything should be fast.

The coolest thing about this is that it would cover just about every 
platform I can think of above PDA level, and with Mesa you could run on 
some PDAs. Plus, it would rock for 3D applications. gl4java provides a 
decent OpenGL API in Java.

Thoughts?

Terry