My hobbyist coding updates and releases as the mysterious "Mr. Tines"

Friday, 30 November 2007

Life in the old dog yet…

Contradicting my earlier assertion that “it's only when you want GUI that you have to get off the fence.” — I've built the Java 1.0-based Gadget Windowing Toolkit against JVM for Java 5 and (with just a little added C#) CLR.

It might not be “teh shiny”, and won't give you mouse wheel events, but it's the fastest way to a common GUI toolkit for both VMs.

Weaning it off the Java 1.0 event model that it uses inside a 1.1 emulator, and using Container instead of its own Gadget class (written because Container and Component had protected constructors at Java 1.0) would make it a lot leaner, and more robust, but it's not a simple matter of mechanically replacing the classes. There is a lot of code dedicated to managing focus and graphics contexts — including managing the masks and offsets — that would have to be carefully moved across.

And of course, there's only the one huge demo/test, rather than unit tests.

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