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Sun Says Java Source Already Available

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wha-when dept.

mjdroner writes "In an InfoWorld article, Java CTO James Gosling says that source code for Java has been available for 10 years. Gosling claims Java is close to an open source model, though discounts Sun joining the Eclipse Foundation. He goes on to say that Eclipse's endorsement of the standard widget toolkit destroyed interoperability, saying it's based on the windows API, making it problematic to run on other platforms."

3 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Destroyed Interoperabilty? by null+etc. · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Moses, come down from the mountain, please.

    Eclipse has shown that the market can indeed rally around Java optimized for Windows. Prior to SWT, remember running Together on cutting edge hardware, and the windows would still take 30 seconds to refresh? No one would tolerate the idea of running Java on Windows for Java's sake, when native apps absolutely destroyed Java apps in UI speed comparisons.

    It's time for the theoretical niceties of interoperability to meet the practical demands of customer acceptance within the Windows market.

  2. Re:Swing by lokedhs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's improved a lot in every release, SWT or not. Today it's pretty damn good on Windows. The situation is worse on Unix though, I can agree with that. On the other hand, SWT sucks on anything but Windows anyway.

  3. Re:Shills polluting the conversation? by nikster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is pretty childish, but here it goes. SWT is what Swing should have been, only Sun didn't invent it first. Sun went the wrong way when they chose "pluggable look and feel" over "looks native on every platform" and they still don't get it.

    You might think that a pluggable look and feel (PLAF) is more general - true. But in reality, in real-life apps, you don't want to shock users with your "different but good-looking" GUI. Instead, you want to look exactly the same as all other apps on that OS. In the real world, the PLAF makes the Swing code so complex as to be almost unusable / unfixable, costs an insane amount of engineering resources which explains why it performs well only on Windows, and remains largely unused. The thing which it is used for most often, namely to look like a native GUI, it does a pretty bad job at. Each new version of the Windows GUI demands a new Java GUI to keep pace.

    Had Sun spent all half the engineering time it spent on Swing on SWT instead, it would be perfect now. I just hope they include it as an official GUI framework in one of the next releases.