Re: [Cxtable-devel] Java on *nix

[Borne Goodman-M. <bm...@eg...>]

Swing is based on the AWT foundation, so it will definitely be slower in
a lot of cases, but it gives a few important things that the AWT did not
have.  Since it is not tied directly to operating system Peer objects,
the Swing UI will look the same on every platform.  There are a lot more
"complex" UI types made for you in Swing, such as tables, tabbed panels,
image buttons, and many more.  3rd but not last, Swing was designed
specifically to be used withing an MVC paradigm, which is the defacto
standard methodology for putting together UIs.

I have never "loaded motif" on any of my linux systems, and I have never
had problems like you say you had.  There are remnants of motif in X,
and perhaps loading non-standard Motif / X packages could cause issues,
but this has never happened to me, nor have I heard of it happening with
a default Red Hat installation.

Depending on what you want the UI to do, Swing may or may not be fast
enough, and you also need to determine the speed / type of system the
software is being designed for.  We of course want the software to work
perfectly on a 486, but I don't think any software that came out in the
last 2 years does.

Swing is definitely eye candy, and if you don't want eye candy than
don't build a GUI, build a text based interface.

The Swing implementation on any platform is more "robust" than the AWT
implementation on that same platform, and Swing should be equally robust
across all platforms, and that is supposed to be the holy grail of java
after all.

--bjgm

On Thu, 2001-12-13 at 11:52, Williams, David wrote:
> OK...  earlier in our discussions we had some talk of Swing vs AWT, etc..
> 
> I have some questions that I'd like to discuss in more detail.
> 
> >From my 'failures' running Java 1.3.1_01 (and for that matter, its recommended Merlin 1.4beta replacement) on RedHat 7.0 did tell me one thing.... 
> 
> AWT in Linux Java uses Motif.  I am absolutely 100% sure of that.  It sucks.
> 
> Swing... what does it use?  I would consider moving the application  to Swing, as some of my most recent changes no longer run correctly under the last MVM release (their implementation of Java, jview..)... 
> {{{ I don't, however, wish to debate that.  I kept compliance w/ jview because a couple of my beta-testers (now they've become more intelligent) were REALLY poor at understanding these things, and they had Jview, and they DL'd the patch from microsoft...and I could test the program w/o impacting their daily software requirements greatly.....  Now I feel that complying with anything Microsoft is not even a priority.  It is something I will 'consider' later...but it is not a project requirement...
> }}}
> 
> 
> Does Swing use Qt?  Does it use Tk?
> 
> 
> Now we come to some other issues.  At some point, I might wish to render animation via tightly constructed messaging...  Swing is more suited to this, no?  ((I am not talking real-time animation...))..  I might wish to consider other things...
> 
> There are other reasons why I avoided Swing for so long...  I constantly read and participate in the Java forums..although after a year of answering "Class not found" questions and having a couple of 'experts' shoot down my non-mainstream solutions as stupid, I felt that my time was better spent coding...
> 
> In my time, though, on the Java forums...I did realize that most people had some type of dislike of Swing, felt that its performance was slow, and that it was eye-candy...that it bulked applications up.... I have to say... these were my first formative opinions of Swing, and its  a hard taste to get out of your mouth once its there...  So I am of two minds on the whole thing...
> 
> One, I like the idea of more flexibility, snappier looking GUIs, and all that... as long as performace won't take a hit.
> 
> However, I still wonder... is the Swing implementation UNDER *nix more robust than the AWT implementation under *nix?
> 
> Anyway...
> 
> ~Dave
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> David Scott Williams
> Computer Associates
> Marketing Representative-Sales Call Center
> One Computer Associates Plaza 
> Islandia, New York  11749
> tel: +1 800-243-9462 ext. 73431
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> fax: +1 631-342-5734
> wi...@ca...
> 
> 
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