[news.eclipse.tools] Re: KDE and GNOME interfaces

["Scott Stanchfield" <thetick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> There are two issues here.  The first, and perhaps the simplest, somes
> in areas where Eclipse wants to know things like MIME application
> bindings.  It has some code for specific to GNOME and KDE to go find
> out the associations, and I was suggesting that writing their own
> is the wrong way to go about it when both GNOME and KDE seem to have
> JAVA bindings of their own.  Its a duplication of effort, and if the
> API were to change is the future the ones that come with GNOME/KDE
> will presumably be kept up to date without IBM having to do anything.

Gotcha...

Actually, I think they'd still need to build an API on top of that so
they have their own API that our apps could use that would workon any
platform.

In the linux dist, their API might be implemented to use GNOME/KDE
support. In a Winoze dist, their API might use Win32 support or
something like that...

> The second issue was to consider using the Java Qt (and related KDE)
> bindings, rather than the Motif binding.  This allows much the same
> kind of integration (and I presume the GNOME Gtk bindings do the same
> for GNOME) under KDE as the Windows bindings allow.  By using DCOP
> (under the covers) things like dropping Konqueror into the child
window
> becomes trivial to provide help.  Qt/KDE also fill in a lot of the
> blanks that Motif leaves and SWT has to fill in for, and also provides
> things like inter application Drag and Drop which currently do not
> work with SWT/Motif if I have read the manual right.

Could be cool... I'd think it's safe to say Motif isn't the least common
denom to support anymore.

Though I'd suspect that IBM would be working on things like this -- not
trying to limit themselves to a single target toolkit per platform.

Other folks could even contribute their own implementations, which could
really be cool...

Later!
-- Scott