Just my two cents on the java GUI front...I work extensively in Java as do most of the folks in my lab. All of us have tried some of the fanciest Java GUI layout tools, and none of us use them now. For the most part, they produce funky code that is no fun to rework, and some of them use non-Java standard libraries. I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't let the lack of GUI tools get in your way. I think you'll find that emacs and a little extra work up front make for a much nicer Java dev. environment than pretty much anything else. As for the client itself, I think you would do well to use an easily-extensible scripting language (I've heard perl and python suggested). Rather than construct a complete GUI application for checking mail/maintaining contacts/etc., you can construct just the front-end. If you provide good hooks into events produced by the GUI, users can hook up their own tools to do the real work. This would allow us to leverage (pardon my management-speak) the huge base of existing tools that Linux gives us. The client would just need to be able to display mail in a pretty, friendly way rather than try to do all of the work. An extensible approach also allows easy addition, removal of other modules/tools that users want to add to the client. Austin Bingham Laboratory for Intelligent Processes and Systems University of Texas at Austin [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- >Java would be a cool language to do it in too, I've been working with it >a lot lately and really dig its simplicity for networking. Last time I >checked, I couldn't find any gtk+ bindings for Java, so it would have to >be written in Swing. That would probably get ugly though, I don't know >of any Java GUI tools for Linux. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Send administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
