biss-awt

[Maksim Lin]

Since biss-awt and kaffe were vaguely linked in the past this is very
vaguely on topic or quite probably off-topic :-)

Anyways there hasn't been much happening with biss for a while.  One of
the guys from the company which created sent out a message on the biss
maillist awhile back asking if poeple were using it/still interested,
but there wasn't much feedback. 

I was really excited when I first came across it (more than a year ago
now I think) but unfortunately I never managed to get the hang of using
it, as it's event model of using observer/observable "sockets" was quite
a different to the 1.1 listener model and I gave up trying to keep both
in my head at the same time.  However, the demo apps that came with it
were the most impressive, the development environment JDE is the best I
have come across - its what you could call a "structured editor" I guess
(the people at transvirtual working on kaffe use a modified version I
think).  Overall it's quite a nice toolkit, but it just turned out that
on a personal level it wasn't for me and it seems to work well with even
the latest versions of kaffe (to keeps this somewhat relevant).

There are a number of free gui java toolkits I've seen on the net, one
that I'm using now is called dogui
(http://www.dog.net.uk/knife/gui.html), it has the l&f of the swing
metal l&f, though it works like the awt.  At the moment it works fine
with kaffe except for one problem with the list/tree component &
resourcebundles (and I think this can be fixed by using classpath
resourcebundle related classes - I need to look into this some more). 
Doggui seems to be still being developed by the author - a new version
was just released and my emails to the author got quick replies.  At the
moment I'm using dogui to make a pale imitation of the biss-JDE (with
some personal preferences of my own built in) and works well with the
JDK1.1.7 and mostly with kaffe (minus the above bug).

Hope that helps.

Maksim.

Fan Howard-W12211 wrote:
> 
> hi all,
> 
> Is biss-awt still alive? Is it the best GUI framework to use for free? Maybe
> it's not right to ask it in this mailling list. I'm sure there're
> knowledgable guy around here. Please help.
> 
> Thanks,
> Fan

-- 
Maksim Lin

"...handing C++ to the average programmer seems roughly comparable to
handing a loaded .45 to a chimpanzee."
                                                          -- Ted Ts'o