GUI Development with Java

But isn't Java proprietary? Well, although Sun invented Java and many of the pieces of technology that accompany it, it can be called an “open” technology. Old-timers will remember how Sun dominated the UNIX distributed file system by making its NFS a public specification, even giving away the source for the RPC and XDR layers that underlie NFS. From the beginning, the specification of the Java language and the specification and format of the compiled class files have been publicly available and the source code of the public API has been included with the freely-downloadable JDK. The source for everything—compiler, runtime interpreter and the internal parts of the API—has been available for free under a non-disclosure agreement that permits free redistribution of binaries. Without this, there would most likely not be a Java for Linux, SunOS4.1 or *BSD. In fact, there are several: JDK ports, Kaffe ports and others. Further, the licensing is designed to encourage the “open API” concept. Read this extract from Clause 2 of the JDK license, which every Java developer who uses Sun's JDK or any derivative must agree to:

Because of this, members of the free software community have responded as enthusiastically to Java as they did to Linux. Several free compilers, at least one free interpreter and many free libraries are available. Even commercial companies are making some libraries free. A good place to explore Java freeware (and payware) is Gamelan (pronounced Gamma-LOHN), at http://www.developer.com/. My own contributions include Jabadex, a Rolodex-like application, a set of X Color names (Java's AWT has only 13 named colors) and others (see http://www.darwinsys.com/freeware/).

Most recently, Sun announced easier licensing—the Sun Community Source License—presumably patterned after the Mozilla license. It's not the BSD Copyright or the GPL, but it's a step closer. See http:java.sun.com/ and look for licensing.

Java's developers wanted everything about Java to be portable, including how to deal with the X Window System, MS Windows, Macintosh and other window systems. The Abstract Window Toolkit is the solution they provide. Instead of starting by writing components that work everywhere, they wrote a library of GUI components that is a least common denominator to what the big three systems offer. It used the underlying native components on each platform, so that it would “look and feel” like a native application. This is an important aspect of user acceptance—if users have to learn a whole new GUI just to use your software, they probably won't bother. This approach limited what you could do with the early versions of Java's AWT, but with more recent versions, this is no longer true. The JFC components bring Java to the forefront of fully functional GUI development environments.

Java has been increasing in popularity since its first public release in 1995. Version 1.0 incorporated the Applet API, a basic window toolkit (AWT) and numerous other APIs. Version 1.1, released in the fall of 1996, added a tremendous amount of new functionality including internationalization, better coupling between GUI controls and their action-handling code, text formatting and hundreds of new classes. JDK1.2 has just been released at the time of this writing (January 1999). Version 1.2 of the JDK, which is also being called “Java 2”, includes the Java Foundation Classes (JFC). JFC includes the Swing GUI classes which are the focus of this article, some accessibility features to make computing usage easier for persons with various disadvantages, the 2-D graphics package and the original AWT.

The 2-D graphics can be thought of as PostScript for Java. If you've done any PostScript, you'll know it is really two things: a scripting language and a marking engine. Since Java already provides a powerful programming language, the 2-D developers needed to provide only the “marking engine” (putting marks on paper), transforms, composites and other fancy graphics and a much-expanded set of fonts. However, it is implemented in a backward-compatible way: a Graphics2D object is subclassed from a Graphics object. This provides Java developers and users with all the fancy graphics capabilities invented over a decade of desktop publishing, all in a platform-independent way.