Re: SWING at OJE

[Rolf W. Rasmussen]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 10:11:15PM +0100, Artur Biesiadowski wrote:
> "Rolf W. Rasmussen" wrote:
> Have you considered skipping Xlib entirely ? There are some projects
> that implement X protocol in java, connecting to X server through net. I
> know it is more work to do, but I suppose that performance improvement
> can be quite big... and you do not have to choose between CNI and JNI.
> This would allow for pure java AWT implementation, which would leave
> native dependency for entire core lib to very small set of libs - libc
> of course, maybe libz (but there is a pure-java zip project going on) -
> anything else ?

libX11 is actually pretty lean and mean. It's everything above it, 
libXt, libXaw, libXmu, libgdk, etc. that adds the bloat. Here is a 
recylced response where I compare my Xlib stuff with the "X protocol in 
pure Java"- projects:

Both Escher and XTC set out to create a 100% pure X11 toolkit. This
means that their toolkits talk the X11 wire protocol directly, rather
than relying on Xlib.
 
My no.rwr.x package is not 100% pure Java. It uses CNI to create a
small OO wrapper around Xlib.
 
By sacrificing being pure Java, you gain all the maturity, features and
stability of Xlib. Some of the features that Xlib gives you for free
are:
 
- Authentication: Host Access, MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1, XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1,
  SUN-DES-1, MIT-KERBEROS-5, etc.
 
- Multiple connection types: local, TCP/IP, DECnet, etc.
 
- Optimizations
        - Batching and coalescing drawing operations.
        - GraphicsContext cache
        - Efficient bit and byte shuffling.
 
- Preimplemented high-level operations.
 
- Thread safety.
 
- Shared memory extensions.
 
...etc...
 
Most of this can be reimplemented in pure Java (as Escher and XTC are
attempting to do), but it'll require a lot of work to get it as feature
complete as Xlib. 

IMHO, the current Xlib implementation is not broken, and the only
reason for not leveraging on it, would be the desire to create 100%
pure X clients that will run on any platform and Java VM that has basic
TCP/IP capabilities.

> Do you think it would be possible to use freetype for java2d font
> rendering ?

If/when Keith Packard's X Render Extension becomes widespread, client 
side font rendering will become the norm. X clients will then use font 
rendering libraries like FreeType either directly, or using higher 
level APIs.

-- 
Rolf W. Rasmussen                              "Printer friendly format"?
                                                     I must be a printer.