Swing (more screenshots)

[Norman Hendrich]

Hello all,

a while ago I made myself some enemies complaining about the AWT/Swing
support in gcj (http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/2005-05/msg00052.html).
Back then, I was really frustrated about obscure compiler bugs in gcj
being fixed within minutes, while even small test programs like many
of the Swing-trail examples from the Java tutorial would crash...

Since then, I swiched from testing gcj+classpath to jamvm+classpath.
Overall, the progress with Swing is really astonishing, despite a few
drawbacks due to added functionality (like the accessibility stuff,
better plaf support, and the repainting refactoring).

---

Perhaps submitting bug reports with testcases made all the difference?

Some days during the last weeks, it really felt like I had three or
four people working just for me: thanks Lillian, Roman, Tony, and Tom F.
Naturally, thanks to all the other AWT and Swing hackers, too.
I would submit a few bug reports in the morning from Hamburg, and fixes
started to come in from all over the world the same day. That is quite
different from my experience with bug reports at Javasoft, where nothing
except the autoreply would ever happen...

To honor all the good work, I created a few screenshots from my test
applications, including some advanced Swing stuff.  Lacking a website
for this, I decided to submit another pro-forma bug report and attached
the images. That way, a snapshot of the classpath Swing status as of
2005.10 will remain online:

gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24256


---

I would have liked to include some Graphics2D stuff, but unfortunately
this doesn't work at the moment (actually worse than 2 months ago).
I also cannot run many real-world applications, but the set of real
show-stoppers in my own test applications is pretty short already.
Sorted by relevance, my personal wishlist looks like this:

(1) fix JScrollPane and JViewport
(2) make JTextField and JTextArea more robust
(3) implement the missing bits of Graphics2D (fix segfaults)
(4) fix JFileChooser (and make it look pretty)

As most 'complex' Swing components like JTable, JTree, JTextArea
are usually embedded in a JScrollPane (or use one like JFileChooser),
the JScrollPane issue is especially annoying. There are at least two
open bugs, but nobody seems to be working on it.

- Norman