Java and Gnome

[Simon Kinahan <simonk cadence com>]

Hi,

I've recently been catching up on the situation with Gnome, and I read in the
FAQ that nobody is currently doing any work on Java support for Gnome (or Gnome
support for Java :) If this is still the case I would be interested in taking on
some of this work, if and when I have some time (which should happen when I get
my home machine sorted out after upgrading the motherboard). Has anyone done
anything in this area, or have any ideas about how it should be done ?

As I see it there are two aspects to this work:

1. A Gtk implementation of the Abstract Window Toolkit, to replace the Motif
one. I cannot see this being hard (he said without thinking about it at all :).
I'm not sure what the situation would be with regard to integration with Sun's
VM or any other for that matter. I know not all Sun's libraries actually use
JNI, at least in 1.1. This would allow Java native applications to run with a
Gnome look and feel, and hopefully interact properly with Gnome drag and drop
etc. 

2. Java bindings for the gnome libraries, especially GTK+, and other gnome
infrastructure (eg. ORBit). Instinct says this is the bigger job, since
appropriate OO representations for everything need to be found. This would allow
Java to be used to write Gnome apps like any other supported language, in the
same way as MS have allowed it to be used to write Win32 apps. 

In theory if 2 is done right, 1 could be built on top of it, but I have a
feeling that this would increase the number of native method calls, and in
general jumping back and forth between native code and Java code is expensive.

Any thoughts ?

Simon