Hi Costantino,
Hallo Pavel, Hallo everyone
2009/12/14 Pavel Porvatov <[email protected]>:
Is it a good idea to implement Windows 7 native file chooser on Java!?
This topic has been discussed in the Swing and AWT teams for some time. By
this time these considerations drove us to the following idea: the
java.awt.FileDialog class should be improved instead of implementing all
possible LAFs of file chooser (for example we need GTK, KDE, Windows Vista
and Windows 7 LAFs)...
I don't know if it's a good idea to emulate the native L&F with Swing
instead of using directly native code with AWT.
Anyway that's the philosophy of Swing and the GTK L&F already exists
and we must do something to improve the current FileChooser (it's too
outdated!).
My project is a concrete attempt to solve this annoying issue... If we
solve this problem with java.awt.FileDialog, I'am also happy ;-)
We believe that attempts to mimic all native file choosers by
JFileChooser is not a right approach. Currently JFileChooser looks like
native GTK application
under GTK look and feel. At the same time it's not an exact copy of
native file dialog (we already miss Windows Vista and
Windows 7 like JFileChooser, as well as different linux distros file
choosers). Swing doesn't have a goal to make a full copy of native
compound components.
This is the library that allows you implement them if needed.
Would you prefer to use native GTK file dialog if it had been
implemented in the java.awt.FileDialog class? Would you be interested to
participate in it?
Regards, Pavel
I do not think this GTKJFileChooser would be a good candidate for JDK7
time frame by the reasons I described above, although we may reconsider
this in the following releases. Does it make sense?
When I wrote that my GTKJFileChooser is almost "feature-complete", I
meant that it is quite usable (on Fedora quite much).
Of course there is still some work to do, but I think the current
state is a good start point.
IMO the issues that you listed aren't critical and they can be fixed
reasonably fast with a little effort and cooperation of other people.
This new GTKJFileChooser can be also be included in a following
OpenJDK release: we must only decide, if it makes sense to continue
this effort and how.
If there are other people in this mailing list that are interested in
this project, please write your opinions and we can elaborate a better
strategy for the future steps.
For example I can also move the source code on java.net and give you
commit right.
