Hi Paul-
[From a thread about Classpath's AWT implementation. Contact me if you
need me to forward the entire thread.]
I wrote:
> I chatted with a former JavaSoft UI dude...
Paul Fisher wrote:
> Is it possible for you to chat with him in the future?
I managed to hook up with my contact. I forwarded our message thread to
him. He wasn't interested in commenting in detail at this time. (He
had told me a few months ago that he had moved on to new challenges.)
However... An old idea came out of our exchange. When Deep Throat and
I first met back in '95, we both marveled at AWT's heavy weight peer
implementation. We both felt that AWT components (and Graphics methods)
should be "lightweight", like Swing is today.
So... I'm curious to see if an AWT can be written WITHOUT heavy weight
native peers. In other words, an AWT emulator. My Deep Throat believes
it would be much more efficient than the current design. (You remarked
on the event round tripping earlier.) Also, cross platform
descrepancies would mostly go away. Lastly, Swing would continue to
work since the "lightweight" AWT would be functionally equivalent to
JDK's AWT.
What would a lightweight AWT emulator look like? The font stuff in
Graphics would have to be in software. How much work is that? I think
interoperability with native drag-n-drop would be feasible. My
impression is the threading issues would be MUCH simpler. Some
packages, like Java2D, Java3D and the Magician OpenGL bindings, may
need heavyweight peers. (Magician has a lightweight component
solution, I cc'd Alligator for his comments.)
Can we explore this idea?
Cheers, Jason
