Re: Java and Gnome

[Hajime Inoue <hinoue cs unm edu>]

On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, Simon Kinahan wrote:

> 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 ?

Olivier Gutknecht has a java-gnome homepage at
http://www.lirmm.fr/~gutkneco/devpt/javagnome.html.

> 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 :).

As far as I know, no one is working on this.  Olivier's work, when I last
checked, has been to write java wrappers around gtk+ without any attempt
to map them to the AWT.  Writing a gtk version of the AWT might not be
hard, but it would be quite a piece of work. 

> 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. 

Olivier's progressed quite far on gtk+ bindings, but only gtk+.  I don't
know much about baboon or how gnome interacts with corba, so I can't
comment except to say that java does corba without the need for native
wrappers.

If anyone's heard about efforts to write a gtk AWT, I'd be interested in
hearing about it.

Hajime Inoue
hinoue@cs.unm.edu
Computer Science Department
Universit of New Mexico