Java filechooser comments

[Jeroen Zwartepoorte <jeroen xs4all nl>]

Hi all,

Just some comments on the "filesel notes" mail from Havoc, the
JFileChooser in particular:

It can be embedded anywhere in a GUI. It extends JComponent (which can
be compared to a GtkWidget). It has default (static) methods for
displaying in a dialog though.

The Java Look And Feel doesn't have a special GUI for selecting a
directory.

The look and feel mechanism allows you to write a custom look and feel
class for the filechooser. There are currently specific implementations
for Solaris (motif), Windows (looks like win2k file dialog) and Mac OS
X. The public API for all these different versions is obviously the
same. The developer has no idea/control over which implementation will
eventually be used.

The JBuilder IDE from Borland uses it's own filechooser instead of the
standard JFileChooser for several reasons: they've extended the GUI to
include a shortcut bar (which you can add your own shortcuts to via an
API) and also implemented their own VFS implementation: you can browse
inside .zip and .jar files for example. I don't recall atm why they
didn't choose to extend JFileChooser instead.

Hope this clears things up,

Jeroen

p.s. I'm not on the gtk-devel-list or gnome-libs-devel list, so CC me
please when replying.