Re: [MacPerl] Prototyping Mac GUIs in MacPerl

[Matthew Langford <langfml [at] eng [dot] auburn [dot] edu>]

I hate to reply to my own posts, but that won't stop me...

On Mon, 10 Aug 1998, Matthew Langford wrote:
> Can MacPerl talk to the MacOS Runtime for Java in any other way than
> AppleEvents?  I'm not sure what I have in mind...but MRJ might come
> closest to a universally installed "compiler" on Macs.  One could use it
> as an XS handler, maybe.

The reason I thought of this is because I believe the Java AWT (Abstract
Windowing Toolkit) is the most officially sweated over and argued about
cross-platform GUI library.  By "officially sweated over," I mean that
Apple itself has dedicated programmers to the AWT, as has Microsoft, Sun,
IBM, and others.  This doesn't necessarily mean anything code quality-wise
over, say, tcl/Tk, but it says volumes about official recognition and
acceptance by these companies.  And most of these companies have at some
time in the past sworn that Java support is high in the Undying
Commitments list.  

Even more importantly, to me, is that _Apple_ has been sweating over how
to make a cross-platform library feel Mac-like, and similarly for
Microsoft et al.  That means the AWT is least likely to sport the
"this-is-an-obvious-port" horn growing out of the forehead of your GUI on
the platforms you aren't familiar with.  Or at least that the horn has a
chance to become so common that one hardly notices it.  To be realistic,
though, many issues won't bridge easily between platforms, and the AWT may
provide least-common-denominator features.  (Those areas might need
platform-dependent optimizations/coding.) 

So if one is looking to avoid Duplication, that's the wheel I would like
to try to (re)use. But I don't have a clue how one could actually get
things to interoperate. 

Somebody else mentioned using QuickTime as a x-plat GUI library, as long
as you were willing to stick with just Macs/Windows.  How would that look? 
All GUI code would be routed through a QuickTime module, which would
handle calling the proper OS routines?  Can you call the MRJ in a similar
fashion?  Or even more troubling, does Windows allow access to a Java VM
in a similar fashion (outside of a browser)?  Surely they would, since IE
is joined at the hip these days with Windows and every Microsoft product. 

And of course on Unix it isn't unreasonable to expect users to download,
compile and install any prerequisite software.  (In this case, Java.) 
That's the way everybody does it.  :^) 


--
MattLangford 




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