Re: Classpath Swing development?

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 23:08, Roman Kennke wrote:
> > The Hacker's Guide would appear to be just that:
> > 
> > http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/hacking.html
> > 
> > This includes a list of VMs.
> 
> Well, yes. But it is not clear, which VMs do support GUI stuff, or is
> this not an issue any longer? At least Kissme, which works good with
> Classpath states that it only runs console apps.

The GUI stuff is what sees the most development at this moment.
In general the README should mention the runtimes which work more or
less out of the box (for the last release at least).

JamVM seems to just work with released and CVS Classpath. JikesRVM is
more difficult to setup but when you get a prototype build going it
works nicely (there is a patch being discussed on the commit-classpath
mailinglist to get the gtk+ peers functioning though.) Kissme works with
AWT (but that is with an older CVS version around when 0.09 was
released, now we need to work on integrating VMAccessController which is
in the patch database and kissme CVS now needs it).

I have not tried IKVM.NET on the latest mono yet. It should come with a
JNI provider which should in theory just work (tm) with the gtk+ peers.
JC and JNode are still on my list to try out (like IKVM.NET they come
with their own adapted GNU Classpath version so I am unsure how well
they work with CVS). SableVM also comes with an adapted GNU Classpath,
the latest release is some recent CVS snapshot with some slight SableVM
specific hacks. For none-core class (java.lang/reflect) hacking it seems
to work nicely.

As Tom mentioned there is also the bleeding edge gcj gui-branch which
you can get through jhbuild as described at
http://people.redhat.com/fitzsim/gcj-and-jhbuild.html
(This does take some disc-space and network bandwidth! But then you do
have everything including the Wonka Mauve Visual Test Engine for AWT).

Kaffe can now also integrate the gtk+ AWT peers though the script of Jim
Huang http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2004-May/046306.html
Kaffe comes with a couple of nice AWT test applications.

> Another issue is, how do I merge the CVS classpath code with a given VM?
> I experimented with SableVM, at least in this case it was easy. I
> checked out Classpath CVS, changed something, compiled everything and
> copied the changed class files into sable-vm's class hierarchy. I don't
> know, if this works in all cases, but I think most of the time this
> should work out right.

It depends on the runtime you use and whether or not they can use a
unmodified GNU Classpath (from CVS). With eeach release we get a better
runtime abstraction so more and more VMs can work with GNU Classpath out
of the box. But in general you can test with whatever runtime you want
and submit a patch against GNU Classpath CVS with the request to others
to test it and/or state how you tested it.

> As valentin stated correctly, a start-up guide would be helpful for
> developers, who want to dive into classpath quickly. Maybe I should
> write one, when I have come this far ;-)

That would be really great! I have installed different VMs so often that
I sometimes forget the simple things that also made it hard for me the
first time setting things up. Having someone that goes through these
steps for the first time documenting it will really help. For 0.08 I
made the following guide:
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2004-03/msg00093.html
I didn't have time to update it for 0.09. But it would be nice to have
something like that for new hackers.

Cheers,

Mark

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part