AWT is dead now

[Nic Ferrier]

>>> Cedric Berger <cedric@wireless-networks.com> 20-Mar-00 7:59:21 PM
>>>

>Nobody uses AWT widgets anymore. 

Frankly this is nonsense.


>I've never seen a new AWT application the last two years. 
>In fact, Swing is widely recognized as the better GUI toolkit 
>availabe today 

Who have you been talking to? Many people who make their living out
of writing Java agree that Swing is bloated and badly designed. Any
close analysis reveals this to be true, at least in part.


>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, ...

Uh... yes. But only when the underlying AWT is the same, since the
AWT is used to implement all Swing primitives.


>2) flexibility: there is not a single part of the Swing library
that
>I cannot replace or subclass in an application. Syntax coloring,
>for example, can be done with 20-50 lines of code, by just
>replacing the text RENDERER.


>IMHO, the right way to develop a graphic library for Java today
>is:

>1) implementing the basic (low level) AWT functionalities.
>Basically Window/Frame/Component/Container/Canvas and
>event handling.

Which is in fact most of the work of building the AWT.


>2) implementing Java2D (it's probably more difficult than 1),
>but it can be done later and its probably a lot of fun to do.

Volunteering are you? Again this is a hell of a lot of work.


>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.

Sure. But before this is finished (sometime in 2020 I should imagine)
can we have at least bits of a working AWT?


Swing is a nice idea but the trouble is it's a lot of work to do, and
it's a lot of bugs and (even worse) bad design (editor kits are my
example of the month).

It's even worse when you consider that Classpath maybe required to
produce all the stuff to do multi-UI.


My suggestion is that Classpath gets a working AWT together then
those programmers who want to use Swing *now* can use Sun's.
Programmers who want to use a free Swing *now* will just have to
wait.



Nic