[Idle-dev] IDLE and Jython

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

*My* experience with swing cannot be adequately described in polite
company.  It is, to put it mildly, the worst-implemented (and near
worst-designed) piece of software I have ever used.

However, a good indication of how "well-engineered" it is: under X
(presumnably the native engineering environment for Sun people) Swing
regularly sends two or more full pixmap copies of the window per redraw
thanks to the tremendously clever "double-buffering" scheme which all
Swing widgets use. This makes performance bad locally, but completely
unusable remotely, even over gigabit ethernet.

So -- in a feeble stab at remaining on-topic -- I think that Jython
support for IDLE would be a good idea.  Unfortunately, there is currently
no reliable or well-performing editing component for Java.  If we are to
move in a direction on some common toolkit, my order of preference is to:

* use WxWindows, swigging it for JNI and making the interface match
  wxPython
* remain with Tkinter, try to improve Tkinter support on Java
* die slowly from exposure, impaled on rusty metal things
* fork IDLE for Java, use an overlay which talks to Tkinter and Swing


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On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:

> 
> Glyph Lefkowitz writes:
>  > The reason I mentioned it is because I was wondering what you're planning
>  > to use to do your GUI -- since there is a free AWT, but no free Swing.
> 
>   My own experience with Swing (early this year) were that it was just
> dog slow and made the process much bigger than it should have been.
> This was on a barely-supported system for Sun:  Solaris 2.6 on SPARC.
>   The jTkinter page makes it look promising, but I don't have any time
> to play with Jython these days.
> 
> 
>   -Fred
> 
> -- 
> Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
> PythonLabs at Digital Creations
> 
> 
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