Feature idea

[Richard Dale]

On Monday 17 December 2001 8:16 am, gigafalk at yahoo.com wrote:
> Gregor Zeitlinger wrote:
> > 2) Java support?
>
> Yes. --> working in Gideon.
Well, nearly working on a good day :). The Java support part in gideon 
probably doesn't currently compile - I need to regenerate the Java JNI 
bindings for the core plugin api, as I expect it's changed in the last month 
or two. I'm intending to do that later this week. 

Here are my plans for Gideon Java support:

1) Compile with gcj/automake 1.5 to native code for apps. Compile to byte code 
for java KParts.
2) Debug with gdb
3) Avoid Sun technology -'Java the Platform', such as AWT/Swing/Beans/JPDA 
etc. Just stick to free software such as gcj or Kaffe, and use the java 
language as a 'better C++' to write KDE and Qt apps. In my opinion, there are 
too many license problems with Sun's libraries, and I don't think they tend 
to be very well designed compared with Qt/KDE for instance.
4) Add changes from Thomas Kuhn so that the KDE java bindings can be used with 
gcj.

But if anyone wants to add project templates for Swing apps, EJB, servlets, 
JSP etc., they should still work ok, just that I don't see them as the main 
focus. There are aleady several IDEs for 'Java the Platform' such as JBuilder 
and Netbeans, and it seems difficult to compete with them directly. But there 
are no gcj oriented java development environments (ie IDE + class libs) as 
far as I know. That seems a big gap for open source/free software 
programming, which needs to be filled.

-- Richard