Volker Jahns wrote:
Is there any recommendations out there, what to use other than Swing to code a _real portable_ Java based GUI (using eg. Kaffe's jvm)? I am looking for a Java class, which doesn't use much space (no bloatware) and is distributed under some form of Open Source license.
That depends on how far you want 'portable' to stretch. AWT is part of all Java releases from Sun since JDK 1.0, but you don't want to use 1.0 AWT unless you have to ;) Kaffe and Wonka, among free runtimes for java, have got pretty complete AWT support, gcj & other GNU Classpath based runtimes are catching up quite quickly. Given the recent progress gcj developers are making on Swing, I'd say that even a free swing implementation is possible within a reasonable time frame. but Swing is only available since JDK 1.2 (or JDK 1.1.7 + external swing.jar).
From my little experience (now that a first Java prototype using Swingcomponents has been coded) it is rather a pain to get that GUI code running on platforms/jvms other than using Sun's newest J2SE, version 1.4.1 or 1.4.2. Thus, while the promised platform indepency of Java is claimed, practice seems to far off this goal.
Depending on how far you want portability to stretch, you can get very nice results using bindings to native code cross platform GUI libraries, like Qt, Gtk and SWT. Since those bindings usually just use JNI, they run fine on most free and non-free runtimes alike. Another way is to abstract the GUI away into an XML representation, and generate platform-specific code form that. XUL, Luxor, XWT go in that direction. I haven't played with either of them, so I can't say how well they work with free runtimes.
cheers, dalibor topic
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