#Java Swing re-implemented for Wayland
Yes, I'm completely mad.
Yes, I know about Wakefield, and Caciocavallo, both have been in progress(ish) for years... nothing has arrived in mainline JDK to fix the internal JDK bugs that prevent a proper Wayland AWT Toolkit. There is a horrid fix in Caciocavallo which uses reflection to monkey about inside the JDK, and needs many command line switches to circumvent security controls...
Yes, I know about XWayland - it's horribly broken for Swing applications (try one!) and is intended as a stop gap, not a long term solution.
#OK.. how?
By re-using the interfaces of Swing, and providing completely new implementations that lean on Wayland and maybe a component toolkit..
Presently, we build a new module / package com.ashbysoft.swingland, so client code will have to adjust imports to use us - this is by design
and also avoids horrible pain in replacing a system module (java.desktop) which is apparantly impossible without rebuilding the whole JDK..
#Build and test
I've chosen to use Ant as it provides just enough build tooling, is self contained, plus I know how to drive it.
Build/clean:
% ant [clean|compile|package (default)] [...]
.....
Test:
% ant [test-wayland|test-swingland|test]
.....
where the test-wayland target directly creates a Wayland window on screen, fills it with random dots for a few seconds and terminates.
The test-swingland target runs a Swing GUI application that extends a JComponent and draws stuff in the paintComponent() method.
It has a working menu bar that demonstrates the popup windows and menuing logic, you can exit via it! test-swingland also demonstrates
a couple of pop up JDialogs (Swing flavour), one with some JLabels and JButtons in a JSplitPane, one with a JTabbedPane...
more to come as I write it! The test target runs both tests.
#Other apps
#Swing demos (in test.jar)
I have started importing some of the standard Swing demos as additional test applications, they should work largely unaltered apart from import statements..
Run one:
% java -cp bin/test.jar com.ashbysoft.test.[TopLevelDemo|ButtonDemo]
#Font Editor (in fed.jar)
Font EDitor is a dogfooding application written with swingland to edit bitmap font files (res/fonts and res/cursors) used by swingland..
Run it:
% java -jar bin/fed.jar -f <font file> [--help]
#Font Display (in test.jar)
FontTest was written to test both the PCF font support and font transformations (ie: rotation), run it:
% java -cp bin/test.jar [--help] [-r] <font name> [...]
where -r rotates the specified fonts instead of simply printing a line of each, font name can be one of: a logical name eg: MONOSPACED;
a resource path in the swingland.jar file for built-in bitmap fonts eg: /cursors/CURLY; a file path for PCF fonts, either absolute or
relative to paths in XDG_DATA_DIRS (by default: /usr/local/share:/usr/share), eg: /path/to/font.pcf, X11/fonts/misc/10x20.pcf.gz.
#More Dogfood..
I've ported my own applications to Swingland, noteably:
- java-sdr My pure Java software defined radio toy..
- powermonitor The two data display apps for my home electricity monitoring setup
#Licence
See LICENCE.md