[java-gnome-hackers] RE: Want Java-Gnome help?

[Tom B. <Tom...@Su...>]

Hi Jeff,

On Fri, 2002-10-18 at 03:57, Jeffrey Morgan wrote:
> I would greatly appreciate your help.  There is a lot
> of activity going on right now on the ATK, GDK, and GTK
> library bindings.  The GNOME portion of the library
> still needs some work.  I hope to finish the lower level
> libraries over the weekend and then focus my attention
> on GNOME.

That sounds great.

> I believe our libglade bindings need some help.  Since
> you have an interest in this I would appreciate it if you
> could take a look and make some recommendations.  One of
> the areas that I would like to see changed in the libglade 
> binding is the event handling.  As you can see from our 
> bindings we have just changed over to a more "java like" 
> event handling API.  libglade still wants to use the old 
> signal_connect method.  As a result I have had to keep our 
> old event handling structure public.f

Sure, I can help clean that up so the old handling code can be ditched. 
One reason open source work is so refreshing is that for years I could
never fix API-related problems in the JRE; one can add to the API over
time, but never remove due to backward compatibility constraints.  As a
result, some things could never be properly addressed.  So let's get the
API as good as possible before there's an installed base to worry about.

BTW, has the team read Josh Bloch's book, Effective Java?  As James
wrote in the forward, I wish we'd known these rules years ago when the
first APIs were designed.

> As far as converting the cormagnon example, I believe it might
> be a little premature to begin this effort.  This example relies
> heavily on the GNOME APIs.  I hope to be at a point where I can
> focus on them next week.

There's obviously no rush to get the examples working.  I purposely
chose something that needed porting to help my own learning.

Tom
> 
> -Jeff
> 
> > I downloaded the java-gnome sources this evening
> > and am impressed by the work done so far. 
> > Building the cromagnon app showed it hadn't been
> > converted after some major API work your team has
> > done, however.  I thought I'd therefore port the
> > example to learn your team's API.
> > 
> > Most of the changes were obvious, and I really
> > like the new API as the changes make the API seem
> > more "Java-like".  This is a pleasant surprise
> > since I was expecting more of a machine
> > translation like many of the other Java library
> > bindings are (the OpenGL bindings come to mind). 
> > I also noticed that some of the conversion work
> > doesn't appear to be done; in particular, the
> > stock menu items referenced by cromagnon.  The CVS
> > dates don't show any activity for a few weeks, either.
> > 
> > So, does your team need any help finishing this
> > library?  I work for Sun Microsystems on mostly
> > open software projects, including NetBeans and a
> > couple of its modules (classfile and metrics are
> > mine).  Prior to that, I was one of the lead
> > developers of Swing and the AWT (although don't
> > blame me for its initial API!).
> > 
> > I am a big fan of Glade, and was starting to write
> > a Java version of libglade when I found your
> > project.  So as a good open source citizen, I am
> > ditching my effort and hope you'll take me on your
> > team instead!
> > 
> > Tom
> >