Re: [platform-swt-dev] Re: Mac OS X Port

["Mark Phippard" <MarkP@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carolyn,

Thanks.  Is this a bug in the mailing list?  Shouldn't reply send the
message to the right place.  I just looked, and every reply I sent today
was to the person not the list!

That isn't how any other list I am on has ever worked.

Anyway, Cocoa is the name of the API for OS X's native widgets.  Actually,
there are two, Cocoa and Carbon.  Carbon is the one that can work in OS 9
or OS X, Cocoa is the one that looks really cool.

In the end, any port will be using one of the two (unless you use Swing or
X Windows I guess).  What we have been discussing is merely the easiest way
to get to the native Widgets.  Apple ships a set of Java classes that
wrapper the native calls to the Cocoa widgets.  Kind of like what you are
doing with SWT on Windows and Motif.  We are merely postulating whether it
might make sense to try to use those Java classes, in effect using the
native code that Apple wrote for us.  It may or may not make sense.  As I
read some of your docs, I think the only way to do the port might be to go
with native code.  On OS X I think you might even have to write the native
code is Objective-C.  I was reading the Apple Java docs and saw something
that JNI can only access programs in the mach-o format.  I am not positive
but I think this can only be done with Objective-C.

I guess let me ask a question.  Suppose Microsoft provided Java classes to
wrapper Win32 (of course they kind of did do this with J++).  Would it have
been feasible that an SWT port to Win32 could have used those classes?

Thanks

Mark