java-gnome-developer

[Java-gnome-developer] gnome-gcj

[Adrian V. C. <ac...@no...>]

Hello everyone,

Good of you to resurrect this project. Since I haven't heard reference to
another similar project, i'm bringing it to everyone's attention to be sure
that you are not duplicating efforts. If both projects are to continue, please
mention your reasoning in the FAQ.

You all know of the gcj component of the Gnu Compiler Collection (gcc). THis
has been moving pretty fast and is getting quite usable. Swing is a longer way
away so Oskar Liljeblad decided to implement gnome-gcj. He seems to have moved on to
other things recently as he got little help. (I never could get the
gcc/gcj/gnome-gcj combination compiled). His project is also on sourceforge at
http://gnome-gcj.sourceforge.net. His email is osk_at_hem.passagen.se. If these
projects overlap as much as I think they do, they could effectively be
combined. If you  alreadly knew about gnome-gcj, then ingnore this.

Keep up the good work
adrian
acuster_at_nature.berkeley.educational

Re: [Java-gnome-developer] gnome-gcj

[Paul G. <pau...@bi...>]

Adrian Vance Custer wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> Good of you to resurrect this project. Since I haven't heard reference to
> another similar project, i'm bringing it to everyone's attention to be sure
> that you are not duplicating efforts. If both projects are to continue, please
> mention your reasoning in the FAQ.
> ...
> If these
> projects overlap as much as I think they do, they could effectively be
> combined. If you  alreadly knew about gnome-gcj, then ingnore this.

Given the technologies they are aiming at (one is compiled Java, the
other interpreted; one uses CNI, the other JNI, etc.), it may be a
little difficult to combine the projects, but as a developer i'd be very
interested in seeing some co-operation between the projects such that
they have the same Java API.

If that were the case, i could do my prototyping in interpreted Java
(jikes is _so_ much faster than any other compiler!  :-) and then switch
to compiled for the final application where the platform permitted it. 
That would be very cool.

Paul
---------
"He must become greater; i must become less." - John 3:30
http://www.bigfoot.com/~paulgear

Re: [Java-gnome-developer] gnome-gcj

[Dan B. <da...@mi...>]

Paul Gear writes:
>Given the technologies they are aiming at (one is compiled Java, the
>other interpreted; one uses CNI, the other JNI, etc.), it may be a
>little difficult to combine the projects, but as a developer i'd be very
>interested in seeing some co-operation between the projects such that
>they have the same Java API.

(Note, I'm a developer who recently joined the Java-Gnome team, and while I
am relatively familiar with the project at this point, I certainly don't
claim to write policy for the group!)

I think there's a reasonably good chance of that happening: GTK is itself
relatively "OO" for a C library (the official GTK metadata has a
define-object construct), so there's a pretty natural correspondence
between GTK types and classes in an OO language. The Java-Gnome project is
pretty much sticking to the GTK line when it comes to associating functions
with classes.

The places where it gets fuzzy are in things like callbacks, where there is
no obvious single "right way" to do the mapping. The Java-Gnome project
is still wrestling with this issue in particular, but no doubt there's more
grey area than that.

The other obvious arbitrary difference is what package to put the classes
in. The Java-Gnome project settled on the top-level packages "gdk", "gtk",
and "gnome" for classes corresponding to those respective pieces of the
toolkit.

Personally, I'd be happy to see a gnome/gtk mapping that worked the same
across Java VMs/implementations. Right now, I think JNI is more widely
supported than CNI, so I'm happy to be working on that first. (Actually,
getting totally un-altruistic for a moment, the one app I care most about
using gtk happens also to require the audio support only available right
now with Sun's JDK 1.3, so I'm most interested in seeing GTK work there
right now.) Of course, there are people who probably care more about
compiling with gcj than running on a JNI-capable VM, and that's
understandable too.

I definitely hope that at some point the projects merge, or align, or
whatever, of course. There's almost certainly some amount of duplicate
effort going on right now (e.g., both projects have to generate Java source
files corresponding to the GTK types, based on the same ".defs" files). I'm
willing to live with that for now, though.

-dan