Friday, May 27 2005 @ 04:25 AM EDT Contributed by: glosser
LinuxJournal attempts to show how to develop GNOME applications in Java.
Design your application's GUI look in XML, write the code in Java and plug the whole thing in to the GNOME desktop.
The original announcement of the GNOME Desktop Project in 1997 stated the following intention, "to use GTK/Scheme bindings for coding small utilities and applications". Since then, the GNOME development platform has provided tools to develop using several alternatives to C. C++, Java, Perl and Python all are supported by the official GNOME distribution. In addition, the Mono Project provides tools necessary for developing GNOME applications using the C# programming language. All of these options are becoming quite popular. The GNOME interfaces for many of the system configuration tools for the Fedora Project, for example, are written in Python, and many new applications are being written in C#. This article describes how to create GNOME applications using the free Java compiler from the GNU Compiler Collection. Although this article focuses on Java, the techniques described revolve around the GLADE User Interface Builder and may be used with any of the bindings supported by the GNOME Project.
The GNU Compiler for the Java Programming Language (gcc-java) is a Java development environment distributed under the GNU General Public License. Because gcc-java is free software, it is developed independently of Sun Microsystems' Java efforts. As a result of this, gcc-java does not yet implement 100% of the Java standard. For example, support for the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) is not yet complete. Despite its current shortcomings, gcc-java shows great promise as the foundation of a completely free Java stack, and it already can be used to build many real-world applications; see the on-line Resources for examples.
Unlike many Java compilers, gcc-java can produce both Java bytecode and a native, platform-specific executable. In the latter case, the executable is linked against gcc-java's libgcj. libgcj is a library containing the core Java class libraries and a garbage collector. In addition, libgcj contains a bytecode interpreter so natively compiled Java applications can interact with Java bytecode libraries.
