Re: OO & GNOME, summary & an action request

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman ireland sun com>]

Seth Nickell wrote:

[among other things, about converting VCL to use native widgets]

There are some engineering problems with using "native" widgets
underneath a platform-independent layer.  Some of these are 
*big* problems.

One of the motivations for Java-Swing, as I understand it, was to 
get out from under this problem.  I repeatedly have heard 
that making the Java AWT widgets behave consistently with 
various peer widget sets (MS, Motif, Mac) has been one of the 
Java group's enduring headaches.  Wrapping the widgets so that they
look the same/expose the same API may be straightforward,
but trying to make their _behavior_ equivalent can be
considerably more challenging.

I don't mean to deny the advantages of "going native"
... but they come at a cost.  

Regards,

Bill

--------------
Bill Haneman
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland