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

[Richard Dale]

On Sunday 18 April 2004 06:19, Werner Punz wrote:
> You might contact the blackdown.org developers, maybe and
> ask them how you can access the sources so that you
> can roll your own jdk for PPC-Linux (maybe there is a debian package
> also in the repository)
>
> The blackdown 1.4.2RC1 is the best JDK I have seen on Linux so far.
> As for SWT, it all comes down to one problem, GKT2 is rather slow
> compared to other toolkits and I never really liked the rather limited
> design of eclipse regarding tables and other user interface items.
> The funny thing is if you run SwingSet2 and Eclipse on Blackdowns jdk
> Linux side by side eclipse thanks to GTK2 is almost twice as slow as
> SwingSet 2. Almost every aspect of the user interface is slower
> beginning from menus and ending with scrolling.
I bet QtJava would easily outperform both, because the Qt toolkit it uses 
keeps getting smaller and faster. 

It might not be quite as customisable as Swing - I don't think you can 
override the 'Model' part of the MVC pattern to the same extent in Qt (or 
QtJava). I think they're fixing that in Qt 4. But it's certainly easier to 
write custom widgets in QtJava than SWT, and from what I've seen of the SWT 
api, it hasn't looked particularly friendly or easy to use compared with Qt.

> I am not sure how the Blackdown people really achieved this amazing
> speed, but my guess is they must have rooted several java2d functions
> into opengl, like FLTK does.
I've been looking around the Blackdown site, and going through the mailing 
lists to see what's going on. There isn't much activity, but maybe that's 
because people are using the IBM PowerPC jdk 1.4.1 port - I found this mail 
from Kevin Hendricks (blackdown powerpc maintainer):

http://www.mail-archive.com/java-linux@java.blackdown.org/msg15420.html

Kevin Hendricks wrote:
 
"Plans yes, but nothing more so far (nothing in the near term from Blackdown). 
We do have some people working on the port but converting HotSpot to PPC is 
not easy to say the least"

So it isn't completely dead as I thought, and there is already IBM version 
that I could use. But I still think gcj/CNI is more appropriate for KDE java 
programming in the long term (or even medium term).

> >>Eclipse simply is the best IDE you can get for free currently.
> >>KDevelop although being nice still is miles away unfortunately.
> >>    
> >
> >Would it be easy to do QtJava and Koala KDE java project templates for
> >Eclipse? There is one in KDevelop, so it might be possible to adapt that -
> > it has placeholders for the classnames, which get replaced with the
> > actual classname when you start a new project. It should be a matter of
> > replacing the placeholders in the sources with whatever Eclipse has as an
> > equivalent. What if you do a plugin or template - do they accept patches
> > and put them in their cvs, or would we need to maintain it in
> > kdebindings?
> I haven´t had a look at the template mechanisms of a Eclipse, but a
> friend of mine once told me that creating new templates in eclipse is
> rather easy.
OK good - that sounds as though relatively little work, would give something 
pretty useful. Especially if the juic tool could be integrated to generate 
gui code.

-- Richard