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

[Richard Dale]

On Friday 16 April 2004 07:45, Dominique Devriese wrote:
> Adrian Petru Dimulescu writes:
> > 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 :)
>
> Agreed.
I thought everyone who used Eclipse was mad on SWT - they never talk about 
QtJava or KDE Koala java, so I didn't think there was any interest out there. 
But I don't really think like the people who post on JavaLobby, I'm not a 
java advocate, it's just a programming language to me. So it's difficult for 
me to tell who they see non-Swing, non-SWT development GUI development.

> > Otherwise, I think tighter integration with gcj can only help,
> > especially at autotools level.
>
> How do you mean ?
Perhaps getting the KDE libtool to include a GCJ tag so it works with gcj 
properly. I don't know who maintains that, or what the problem with it is.

> > From my point of view, developing with the JDK runtime and
> > distributing the compiled binaries would be ideal
>
> Why ?
I can't see any need to use the JDK - maybe better debugging than via gdb 
perhaps I don't know. I don't think there's any real need to compile kde apps 
with gcj to native code, they run just fine interpreted with gij I would say.

> > -- that is, until an opensource jdk becomes standard part of any
> >    distribution.
>
> Most distributions ship gij, gcj and fastjar, and these can be argued
> to form a more or less complete JDK, no ?
The jdk contains a whole pile of stuff that isn't needed for KDE development, 
such as Swing for instance. And it's binary only, which means if it wasn't 
compiled with the same version of gcc as kdelibs it just doesn't work when 
they're linked together. That's put people off using the bindings as they 
assume it's a bug in kde java.

Whereas gcj has better integration with C++ libraries via CNI, and doesn't 
suffer from the binary only problem. It is improving at a much faster rate 
than the jdk, and seems about to hit critical mass later this year.

I'm not sure how well Konqueror works with java plugins, it might be possible 
to switch to gij for those - I read about a project to build a Netscape 
plugin for gij somewhere.

-- Richard