--- "E.L. Willighagen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I was wondering though... Is Swing the only GUI available? That is, are there > > alternatives? There is AWT ofcourse, but I nevered used that, because Swing > looked so much better...
No. But Swing is the one that's most widely used, as it's already part of the JDK. > What about the KDE bindings? (Are there Gnome bindings too?) Is there a > Debian > package that uses the KDE bindings for Java, and have KDE provide the GUI > stuff? Could that be an alternative to build truely free Debian Java GUI > programs? Yes, there are Java binding for different graphical toolkits. Google finds them all ;) In fact, through JNI, which is part of a JVM, you can call pretty much any native library, graphical or not. But that doesn't matter for existing java applications, unless you want to go ahead and rewrite their GUIs for some particular native toolkit. That means your former cross-platform Java program is now bound to the platforms where a port of the native toolkit exists, and that's not always desirable for the upstream. In my opinion, a pure java, liberally licensed, free software, swing implementation would be preferable to native-toolkit based swing implementations. The hypothetical [1] native speed advantage is not as important as cross-platform/cross-vm deplayability of Swing apps to me. cheers, dalibor topic [1] I'm not aware of anyone, commercial or free, who has managed to write a Swing wrapper around a native graphical toolkit. So any claims of a speed advantage by implementing Swing in native code are purely hypothetical. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo http://search.yahoo.com
