[kaffe] Kaffe + SWT

[Dalibor Topic]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 10:34:34AM +0200, Lars Eriksen wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Is it possible to create stripped down Java GUI applications with Kaffe 
> for the Win32 platform?

Hi Lars,

It should be possible, but it will require some work, depending on what
solution you need. If you can use Cygwin, then you should be able to get
Kaffe to buld and run by following the instructions in FAQ/FAQ.win32.
If you can't use Cygwin, then you'd have to merge in the port to mingw32
from PocketLinux Kaffe CVS first.

> It seems to be different with Kaffe - it's open source and is in no way 
> legally connected with Sun. I wouldn't mind using an embedded virtual 
> machine instead of a natively compiled executable, nor to create 
> non-Java-standard compliant applications (it seems Kaffe is not 100% 
> compatible).

Technically speaking, Kaffe is not Java(TM) certified, which is not the
same thing as being 100% compliant with the specifications. Former is a
marketing issue, the latter is a technical one. :)

That being said, I don't think Kaffe would pass 100% of 1.5's test suite
atm, since it still lacks some parts of the specified APIs.

Since Kaffe is licensed under the GPL, you can distribute your own versions 
of it, and modify them as you wish, for example by adding or removing code.

> So is it possible at all? And if so, what are the executable sizes one 
> can expect?

I believe that it should be possible, but I've not used Kaffe on Windows
myself save for testing the build on Cygwin, and making it work a bit
there. There is a patch from Shudo that improves things on Cygwin,
afaik, but I don't know if Kaffe is very stable on Windows yet. You
could give CVS head a shot and see if it works for you.

If that fails, there is a new project that distributes a build of gcj
4.1.x for windows, afaik. See the archives of the gcj mailing list for
details. Another option would be to use IKVM on top of Mono or
Microsoft's .NET implementation. As long as you are interested in SWT
applications, that should work. If you want to have Swing support, you'd
have to look at the gtk port for Windows, or building GNU Classpath's
QT4 based AWT peers for windows.

cheers,
dalibor topic

> Thank you.
> 
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