Hi All:
I was recently having a discussion with some collegues recently about
Swing, user interfaces,
and so on, and I was complaining about the fact that although my Java
development
environment is very nice, i.e. it's Java, the actual desktop that I also
spend a lot
of my mental time working with is rather horrid, i.e. it's NT.
We were talking about how this situation might be fixed, in other words,
what would it
take to create a "Java Desktop" and the main problem appears to be that
none of us know how
to acquire the desktop as a drawing surface from the underlying OS. By
desktop, I mean the underlying
screen on which the NT Taskbar appears and the various, icons, shortcuts
etc.
I spent part of the weekend looking at the DirectX API from MS and it
would appear that
in fact, it is possible to use this to get access. MS is forced to do
this because its
the only way to get enough performance for twitch games like Quake.
However, creating a
JNI interface to DirectX could involve quite a lot of work because in
order to use the existing
swing frames, windows etc, you presumambly have to somehow support both
Graphics and presumambly
Graphics2D as well.
Given that the Windows desktop is probably the most valuable real estate
on the
planet, taking it over with a real portable Java Desktop sounds quite
attractive. Has anyone got any alternative
approaches that would allow us to do this ? As I mentioned, the
fundemental issue appears to be drawing on the screen although
there may be other problems as well (e.g. capturing _all_ mouse events).
All the best.
Andy Dwelly
===========================================================================
To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body
of the message "signoff JAVA2D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
