[kaffe] Replaced the good old lightweight AWT?!

[Jim Pick]

Actually, we have multiple AWTs now, selectable at configure time.

I wouldn't mind seeing it so that we could compile them all in, and
easily select them at run time, using properties, or something like
that.  If somebody was really ambitious, maybe it's even possible to
mix them up, and run multiple AWTs at once.  :-)

I'd like to see a merge of the old Transvirtual lightweight AWT from
the PocketLinux fork of Kaffe.  That had a lot of neat stuff, and
support for things like drawing to the framebuffer, and quite a few
low level graphics libraries.

Also, there's Classpath's AWT, which has GTK peer classes implemented. 
They've got some Swing stuff too.

Another cool one to suck in might be Rudolph (from Acunia's Wonka VM),
which also works on the framebuffer.

Another one that looks interesting is Agile2D, which is a Java 2D
implementation, that sits on top of OpenGL (released under the MPL). 
It's not really an AWT, but they have pictures of Swing running on top
of it.  We could port the back end of the Transvirtual lightweight
AWT onto it, I think.

Interestingly, Sun seems to have gotten the message, and it coming out
with their own Lightweight AWT for Tiger (Java 1.5).
 
http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/sf2003/conf/sessions/display-1999.en.jsp

Cheers,

 - Jim

On Sun, 2003-06-15 at 22:50, Clemens Eisserer wrote:
> Hi there!
> 
> I just read the release notes of Kaffe-1.1 and I was really shocked. I
> dont have the opportunity to test kaffe-1.1 by myself so I´ve to ask.
> 
> I read that theres a new AWT that uses QT as underlaying toolik. Was the
> old lightweight AWT replaced with this heavyweight toolkit?
> My Problem is, that I was very happy with the old solution, because it was
> so incredible fast, especally for other lightweight toolkits (Biss AWT,
> Ought2, ..).
> I also tinkered in integrating Biss-AWT instead of the "old" AWT used in
> Kaffe, because it has all the common awt features but also supports a lot
> of other new widgets.
> For JVM´s that doesnt include these new AWT classes it would be no
> problem, to create "compatibility packages" which only include classes not
> included in the standard classpath.
> 
> With QT creating such packages would be really hard, the native widgets
> need to be created lightweight for other JVM´s!
> 
> The second problem I see is that QT slows down all the primitive drawing
> functions which are used very often by lightweight toolkits! I loved kaffe
> because it used the underlaying X directly without requiring a native
> toolkit whioch slows down drawing speed, because of adding a new layer of
> code!
> 
> Kaffes built-in Gui support is very poor for bigger apps, and because of
> free swing replacements doesnt come up (I also tried it by myself, butthe
> toolkit seems to be incerdibly overdesigned and ugly!) it would make sence
> in my opinion to extend the currently used AWT implementation.
> 
> But when QT replaced all the great lightweight stuff, all my thoughts are
> useless ;-((
> 
> Please tell my your ideas!
> 
> lg Clemens
> 
> 
> 
> 
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