This article is the 2nd in a 2-part series of articles on getting up and running with GCJ on Mac OS X 10.3.4 (“Panther”). The first article addressed getting a recent GCJ release built and installed on OS X (with no Swing/AWT support), along with some rationale on why you’d want to do such a thing. This article deals with building and installing a Swing/AWT-enabled GCC straight from cvs.
Using Swing/AWT with GCJ on Mac OS X
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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There was some brief refrence to SwingWT in the article. I’m curious, has anyone here had much experience using it, and if so what’s your opinion of it at the current stage of development? If it works well, it seems like the best of both worlds scenario that might finally tempt me to get back into Java.
I guess I’m not quite sold on the need for a clean-room (FSF) JRE. However, an X11 implementation allows the possibility of running old PCs as X term clients to an OSX machine with OSX providing the ‘grunt’.
We tried this several years ago with openserver and while the performance wasn’t great, I’m guessing that techniques for remote X (AWT) have improved since then.
Scoff if you may, but it’s not a solution Apple would ever provide…
Running in X11 is a serious limitation in my opinion. Actually I find that the Apple Java integrates quite nicely into OS X, unlike Windows and Linux JRE. OS X is the only system where Swing apps don’t look too alien, so running Swing in a GTK implementation under X11 seems to be a step backward to me.
I personally don’t see any practical usage for this currently.
… it is possible to just use Swing under X11 and change the desired theme.
True, but X11 apps don’t really behave like native apps on Linux. Like another poster pointed out, Swing on Apple integrates well with the surrounding environment and doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Swing running in X11 emulating Aqua would.