Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 10:24:46 -0700 From: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> To: Joe Yandle <joe@wlcg.com> Cc: freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: GUI toolkit Message-ID: <199911181724.KAA15765@mt.sri.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.991118115620.1263A-100000@sith.wlcg.com> References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.991118115620.1263A-100000@sith.wlcg.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> In all the excitement of the past few days (we're over 1000, congrats > everyone!), I never got around to asking a question that's been nagging me > for some time. Why do the unix jdk releases invariably use Motif as their > GUI toolkit? Apart from the fact that it's the oldest toolkit around, I > see very little to recommend it. Because the source is written to use Motif, since that was the only stable fairly bug-free available on Unix when JDK1.0 was released. One can argue that this is still the case. :( Sun also *owns* the rights to Motif, so they can use it for no cost, and CDE *is* Sun's platform, which requires a Motif look-and-feel, and CDE uses that format because of the same reasons stated above IMO. > When I first began writing Linux GUI apps a few years ago, I used Motif > for this reason. However, I was never satisfied with their appearance; > Motif just isn't an attractive toolkit. I looked around, and eventually > settled on GTK+. It's good looking and has a liberal license (LGPL, which > is basically the GPL without the viral clauses, so you can link it with > proprietary code). That wouldn't work for Sun, which *needs* to be able to use something it has complete access to. Of note, they modified the Motif source code on the most recent releases to fix bugs in the JDK. Unfortunately, we have no access to those changes, so we're missing out on those fixes, but on Solaris those fixes are now present since Sun ships their own 'modified' Motif shlib. > I guess this question is mostly posed towards Nate, but everyone else > feel free to respond. Why don't we consider changing the widget set? Is > it a matter of keeping source compatibility with other UNIX JDKs? Is it > familiarity with Motif? Maybe it's just a desire to keep from having to > rewrite all the widget code? The latter more than anything else, simply because when the 'baseline' code uses Motif, any time you diverge from it you lose all semblance of being able to track what happens w/regard to new features and such as patched versions are released. Doing a non-Motif AWT is *very much* non-trivial. None of the other JVM's have gotten it right right (Kaffe, etc..), although they are close. It's a hard problem, and given we can't even get the stock stuff working right in JDK2, I don't see us even starting to have a solution if we didn't use Motif... Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-java" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199911181724.KAA15765>