[Kde-java] Should we ditch support for Sun's JDK in favour of Free Software?

Richard Dale Richard_Dale at tipitina.demon.co.uk
Fri Apr 16 05:18:13 CEST 2004


On Thursday 15 April 2004 22:16, Adrian Petru Dimulescu wrote:
> On Thursday 15 April 2004 20:37, Richard Dale wrote:
> > Lets all move to gcj, what is the point of supporting Sun's stuff unless
> > we're paid - we don't need them?
>
> I am not very sure it would still be possible to use Eclipse in order to
> develop KDEJava apps. That may render KDEJava less attractive to some
> people (me included :)
OK - I'm only really talking about version 2 of the bindings for KDE 3.3, not 
the current version. It was just seeing that the jdk on LinuxPPC was probably 
dead and stuck on jdk 1.3.1 - it hit a bit of a raw nerve with me. What I'm 
am I supposed to do to make WORA work for Sun, buy an Intel box?

I've been looking at java-gnome today, and as far as I can see even the 
current Qt/KDE bindings are on a different scale. I counted 3600 native 
methods vs. 23000 in Qt/KDE, and it doesn't even appear to have any sort of 
runtime for keeping track of java instances mapping onto their corresponding 
C++ instances and so on.

> Otherwise, I think tighter integration with gcj can only help, especially
> at autotools level. From my point of view, developing with the JDK runtime
> and distributing the compiled binaries would be ideal -- that is, until an
> opensource jdk becomes standard part of any distribution.
It's an efficiency/development time thing, I think CNI/gcj is much better for 
a large C++ integration project, like the KDE bindings, than the jdk. If you 
link to a large C++ library, according to Sun it isn't 'Pure Java' - they 
seem to want to discourage the idea. And they aren't doing anything to help 
develop the Gnome java bindings as you might expect they would.

-- Richard


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