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

[Werner Punz]

Richard Dale wrote:

>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, if you really want to go the Eclipse route, I knew I once saw a 
small article, regarding template generation.
IBM has a good tutorial regarding eclipse templates and how to generated 
them on their site:

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-JET/jet_tutorial1.html

This might give you a headstart.

Another very feasable and even more flexible option probably would be to 
use jakarte Velocity in combination with ant. This one could be 
integrated into an ANT task.

My personal opinion is that velocity is the best template language there 
is currently, in combination with a very open license.