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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Java bindings for KDE/Qt
From:       Sirtaj Singh Kang <ssk () physics ! unimelb ! edu ! au>
Date:       1999-02-22 23:46:00
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On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Yannai A. Gonczarowski wrote:
[snip]
> This is probably not very realistic, but the best solution would be to port
> the AWT classes to use KDE/Qt instead of motif, thus offering true 100% Java
> integration.

I tried this back when KDE was around 6 months old and I was using java a
lot for work. I could show windows etc using Qt widgets, but I did not
know how to mix Java's threads with Qt's event loop. I tried calling
processEvents but that sucked because it used too much CPU. But letting
the Qt event loop take over the app was suboptimal since that would
basically block every other thread in the JVM. 

Something that occurred to me was to run a pipe between the JVM and a
GUI proxy process, sort of like the X server, that does all the GUI stuff
and can send and receive events from the JVM. It would be slow but it
would work...

I haven't really looked into it since then. It seemed like a lot of hard
work (j2c++ and a standardised JNI didn't exist then) because every class
and every method would have needed to be run through a generated extern C
method before being hooked into the JVM. I didn't want to do all that, so
I just stopped. :) Maybe it will be easier now with Roberto's QtC stuff? 

Someone with more idea of JVMs and interfacing them with C++ would do a
lot better than me, I guess. But I'd love to have a java that used Qt
instead of Motif for its AWT. 

-Taj.

Sirtaj S. Kang       taj@kde.org         ssk@physics.unimelb.edu.au
School of Physics    Univ of Melbourne   KDE: The Desktop sans Toga

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