Re: I wish to help

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 13:02, Jeffrey Morgan wrote:
> I would like to contribute to the classpath project.

Thanks. That would be very nice!
We have a little document to help people get up to speed fast.
The GNU Classpath Hacker's Guide:
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/doc/hacking.html

But if anything in there is unclear please ask on the list.
There is also the HACKING file in CVS.
We do release snapshots from time to time, but we are still a
development project so working from CVS is preferred.
Please let us know if you need help setting things up.

> I would like to ask the current developers where I 
> can be of the most use.  I have several years of JNI 
> experience and have worked on several open source GUI 
> toolkits.  I know the GTK library stack very well and would 
> therefore prefer to work on AWT if possible.  I should
> mention that I am the primary developer for java-gnome
> and will be splitting my time between the two projects.

These are really good skills and very much needed!
I think that everybody will agree that we need people to work on our AWT
implementation so I will give you a short introduction on the current
status.

We have most of the AWT framework, AWT peer classes and C/JNI GTK+ (1.2)
bindings. But it doesn't work... On the other hand, it almost works :)
http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/classpath/2002-July/002444.html
http://people.debian.org/~jewel/kissme/shots/kissme_awt.png
So there is some real hacking to do here. But it can lead to results
quickly.

I am afraid that the original AWT Hackers (Paul Fisher, who created the
GTK+ peers and Aaron Renn, who created most of the java awt framework)
are no longer working on the Classpath project. But we are merging our
class libraries with the libgcj team and the libgcj awt hackers (most
notably Tom Tromey) are still very active (although not working that
much on awt related things).

The GNU Classpath/libgcj merge status can be found at:
http://gcc.gnu.org/java/libgcj-classpath-compare.html
Almost everything from java.awt has already been merged.

An interesting outside project is the AWT implementation from Wonka
(called Rudolph). It has never really been tried with GNU Classpath, but
I suspect that the JamaicaVM people are going to try to get it working
with Classpath.
Chris Gray said that they wanted to relicense it if needed but I don't
know if they are actually going to donate it to the FSF for inclusion in
the GNU Classpath project. Note however that Rudolph is not a peer based
implementation.

Hope that gives you an idea on where we are with java.awt at the moment.

Cheers,

Mark