[jsword-devel] RCP/SWT

[DM Smith]

Aleksander Rozman wrote:

> DM Smith wrote:
>
>>> 3. SWT is part of Eclipse, and while Eclipse works on most of 
>>> existing platforms, SWT does not. SWT works 100% on Windows and 
>>> Linux, but on other platforms it doesn't, at least not all versions 
>>> and not fully (SWT 1, SWT 2 are little bit older version and since 
>>> they have been out for long time, they became suported, SWT 3 still 
>>> has a lot of problems on most of platform). I know this as a fact, 
>>> since SWT 3.1 support (in Eclipse 3.1) in FreeBSD (which I also use 
>>> beside Win) was added just recently and NOT into Eclipse but as 
>>> separate entity. I imagoine that the same problems are with Mac and 
>>> Sun system, and others.
>>
>>
>> Hmm, not good! I think then that we should probably continue to 
>> support Swing for the foreseeable future. We try to keep away from 
>> the bleeding edge in what we support (for example, we still develop 
>> with Java 1.4.2)
>>
>> There is also the problem of older platforms. One of our desires is 
>> to support missionaries, pastors, Christian schools and the like who 
>> run old hand-me-down machines. At some point BibleDesktop will 
>> outgrow an old platform. (For example, my old win 98 laptop with 32M 
>> ram and slow hard drive runs so slow that I don't like to do anything 
>> on it. I imagine that BibleDesktop would not be very usable. I have 
>> not actually tried it.)
>>
> Did you try to build with Java 1.3? Java 1.3 is still new version of 
> java, and if desktop runs on java 1.3, this could be used on older 
> computers.

We cannot build with 1.3, but it may be possible to run with a 1.2 or 
1.3 jre. We may need to set binary compatibility to a pre 1.4 level 
though. I have not tried this.

> Running java programs is quite problematic. You need quite a lot of 
> ram in your computer. I would think that you would need at least 128 
> Mb for just running java, maybe by using older java (1.3) we could 
> lower RAM requirement, so that Bible desktop could also be run on 
> older computers. 

I am going to be testing it on my Win98 laptop to figure out what the 
minimum is. One thing that I have found so far is that upgrading IE to 
6.x makes the 32M laptop too slow. I will be reinstalling Win98SE and 
before patching it, testing BibleDesktop.

> Usage of SWT is problematic for one other reason, it requires a lot 
> more RAM. So this would be a NO NO for older computers.

The simple prototype that I wrote actually used a lot less RAM. (Than 
the equivalent with swing.) Perhaps it is more about the usage of it 
than the library itself.