Re: Event class?

[Bryce McKinlay]

Tom Tromey wrote:

> Paul> I'd like to see the GTK peer code work with the libgcj AWT,
> Paul> assuming it's technically possible.  Licensing on the GTK
> Paul> portion is not an issue, since Jim Blair and I wrote the code.
>
> I'm sure it is technically possible.  libgcj supports JNI.  Bryce has
> been interested in changing the peers to use CNI though.

Yes. The existing classpath peers won't work out-of-the-box on libgcj,
because we (Rolf Rasmussen and I) have made some changes to the
java.awt.peer interfaces to simplify them, support new functionality
introduced the Java 1.2/1.3 AWT, and improve performance. It would not be
overly difficult to update the classpath peers to work with libgcj's peer
interfaces if/when the libgcj AWT code is merged into classpath. However,
this would mean that the classpath peers would no longer work with Sun's
JDK 1.1. They won't work with newer JDK versions anyway because the peer
interfaces are now private to Sun's implementation.

> We might have enough of the java side of AWT to bring up a window.

Yep. I even have a screenshot:

http://waitaki.otago.ac.nz/~bryce/shot.jpg

What you see there is about the limit of the current GTK peer's
functionality however - unfortunately I've hardly worked on them at all
since then. The xlib peers are somewhat more complete:
http://www.ii.uib.no/~rolfwr/jcnix/AWTDemo.html

> I don't consider licensing an issue here since Gtk itself is LGPL.  So
> the peers might as well be...

Well, if that means the peers must be in a shared library, that could be
inconvenient for people who want to deploy applications with libgcj
statically linked. This is more important for the peers than for GTK
itself because GTK is much more likely to be already installed on a given
system, and more likely to be able to maintain binary compatibility
between releases.

regards

  [ bryce ]