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Re: Emacs with Guile [Swing]


Richard Stallman writes:
> What is the license of Swing?

Klaus Schilling replied:
> As part of Sun's java library it is as proprietary as all of sun's
> java stuff.

That is not quite correct.  There is also a Swing distribution
which runs on top of JDK 1.1, and I believe it has a different
license.  But it is still definitely a non-free license.
I have met with people in the Swing group, and they understand
our concerns, but I don't know if Sun can be pursuaded to free
up Swing.  Perhaps if a free-implementation made serious headway,
that might motivate them to change.

"Nic Ferrier" <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> writes:
> There are serious doubts about Swing in the Java community. It's an
> enormous toolkit and much of it is badly implemented. 

Do you have a pointer to a technical "review" of Swing?

Swing is certainly big, and there are certainly bugs - as well as
strange undocumented behavior.  But there are also good idea in there.
The most important one is the separation between the "model" (the
data) and the "view+controller" (the UI).  This is of course the same
concept as Emacs's separation between "buffer" and "window", which is
one reason it makes sense to base JEmacs on Swing, rather than plain
AWT.

> From what I've seen of JEmacs the Swing used could easily be
> implemented as part of a free project.

"Easily" is parhaps a bit strong.  However, the subset of Swing needed
by JEmacs is relatively manageable.  And I do think the Free Software
community needs a Free version of at least a sub-set of Swing.  While
Swing has its problems, it is a better and cleaner than the design
than AWT, and it is the standard for Java GUIs.  (Note that while
Swing uses the low-level parts of AWT, it provides improved
mostly-compatible re-implementations of the AWT widgets.)

Parts of Swing we would probably want to implement differently than
Sun anyway, using other libraries.  For example, instead of the
Pluggable-Look-And-Feel, it may be better to write a Java wrapper
around the Gtk theme switching framework.

> It could then be distributed directly with JEmacs. 

I don't think that makes sense. 

> I don't want to speak for Per but I suepct he's developing it with
> Swing because it's a bit simpler.

Well, Swing clearly shows inspiration from Emacs, and provides
lots of functionality that is needed for Emacs.  The main one
is the separation between the Document (data) and the Views (UI),
as mentioned above.

> When JEmacs is on a stronger footing
> many free Java programmers (including myself) would be happy to help
> with the fixing of the bits of Swing that are needed.
> But implementing the whole of Swing would, as Klaus reports, be a
> major project and of doubtfull worth until Swing stablises.

That is my feeling too.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/~per/

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