On Wed, 24 May 2000, Pablo Vasques Bravo-Villalba wrote:
> > Ofcourse the specs will be free. However, I think it would be a waste of
> > time to produce a separate implementation of the toolkit for every system.
>
> I meant different toolkits for different systems. Yes,
> it may be a waste of time, but may happen anyway. `:)
If different people start working on different implementations, there is a
smaller chance that there will be a complete toolkit available for the
system you use.
> Well, you really don't need much from the interface
> in this kind of apps. I can't name the libraries right
> now, but I'm sure there are some.
A nice game toolkit would need things like menus, file open/save dialogs,
multiple windows, cut and paste etc.
> I wasn't thinking on a GUI. Does Java's GUI
> implementation is consistent across platforms?
Java AWT adapts itself to the platform it runs on. So for example radio
buttons on Windows look like Windows radio buttons and radio buttons on
Unix look like Motif radio buttons.
Java Swing uses the same look-and-feel on every platform. More accurately,
it lets you select a look-and-feel from a list and that look-and-feel is
the same independently from the platform it runs on. So you can select a
Windows-like look-and-feel even if you run it under Unix.
However, my experience with Swing is that its responsiveness is poor. For
example: it takes about half a second for a menu to appear. Since
responsiveness is one of the most important aspects of a GUI (along with
consistency), I think the current Swing implementations are useless.
> I think it's not possible to port an app and
> maintain the same GUI look-and-feel. I never
> saw an app entirely in Java, so I can't tell
> about Java.
Java AWT, if used properly, will look pretty much like the OS you're using
it under.
One thing you should never do with AWT is calculate everything in pixels,
like for example Delphi does. GUI elements (widgets) have different sizes
on different platforms. But if you want to make a program that runs well
under different resolutions and with different font sizes, you shouldn't
use pixel positioning anyway.
> I considered it, but never saw anybody talking
> about Mac here, then I assumed there are no Mac
> users in this list. <:)
I don't think there are much, but there will be a few. And if they can use
the toolkit, that's a bonus.
> > > I may be biased here, because I really hate Java. `:]
> > Why?
>
> Can't explain very well. But I misworded my
> phrase. I don't really hate Java, I just don't
> like it. I think it just feels strange. But I'm
> not a (good) programmer anyway.
I really like Java. It saved me from those horrible pointers. It saved me
from memory leaks (garbage collection is great). It can create arrays as
large as I want them (I used Turbo Pascal before) and the array size can be
determined at run time. It supports multi-threading in the easiest way I've
seen yet (multi-threading is never really easy, but that's inherant to
parallellism).
> I really hate Cobol. `:)))
Can't comment to that, I've never programmed Cobol.
I think QuickBASIC is the ugliest language I've used. I used to love it,
because it was like MSX BASIC, but now I think it's horrible.
> > I can imagine if you hate the many useless applets that are on the web today
> > (most either don't add anything to the page or don't work well). But that
> > isn't an argument against the language itself.
>
> I hate those, too. ^^ But I agree: there must
> be, somewhere, some well-made Java app. `:)
MCCW is made with Java tools. They are command line tools that generate the
HTML code, so they are not present in the web pages. But they are very good
tools (applications, not applets, I'm not sure which one you meant with
"app." :).
Bye,
Maarten
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