B. Craig Taverner writes:
| On Wed, 27 May 1998, Aaron Walker wrote:
| > I don't know about the rest of ya, but I like the Swing GUI. I was
| > thinking why can't we make a suite of Linux tools in Swing. Such as a
| > window manager (if it's possible), a file manager, control-panel, etc.
| > I'm already working on a file manager called jfm, and I will continue
| > working on it even if nobody likes my idea and decides to go one step
| > further.
|
| Interesting idea. I like swing too.
|
| I was thinking how this idea relates to netscapes idea of making an
| integrated communicator/linux platform to compete with the windows/IE
| integration. If I had the time I might also be interested in coding some
| utilities, but it's not to be ;-<
|
| I wonder if netscape has started any java utilities along this line? I
| expect the browser is the window manager and filemanager, but everthing
| else could be java.
Might be nice if -everything- were done through the
browser+[signed]applet mechanism and network protocol: This would
allow such Linux applications to be run from just about any Windows or
Mac box, and possibly some or all of the new dumbed-down
browser-capable set-top boxes due out soon. (Always nice to lead
the technology curve a bit in the design phase.)
Browsers as the new network window system, if you will: This seems to
be the general trend.
It's true that one can already run an X server on a PC and access a
remote Linux GUI. But the typical PC doesn't have an X server
installed and never will, so this inhibits grabbing a random Windows
box to do some remote Linux work (and likewise makes it harder to hook
PC people on Linux apps), whereas its clear damn near everything will
have a Java-capable browser installed in due course.
I'm likely to be doing something at least vaguely along these lines: I
want to use browser-based Swing widgets as the remote GUI client for a
distributed multi-user application server I'm developing. If a generic
mechanism were developed for allowing server-side apps to interact with
client-side Swing stuff, I might be interested in hopping on board...
