cies' blog

Recently Trolltech announced that they will releasing Java bindings. We used to have Qt and KDE Java bindings (by Richard Dale) but they never managed to attract much interest. What will Trolltech do to make their Java bindings a succes? I believe they will be.

Times also have changed a little, Java 1.5 copied some usefull C/C++ features (mainly templates and enums). I guess the upcoming QtJava bindings by Trolltech will depend on Java 1.5.
There is also a lot of effort put in a 'free' Java lately. GCC sports a Java front-end for a while called GCJ that compiles java code -> byte code -> executables, there is the GNU Classpath implementation of the 'standard java lib', and there is an ever growing list of free JVMs.

Qt has a long history of running on many platforms, all of Qt will just be platform optimised C++, Java will only be a thin layer. So Qt has the potential to make Java GUIs very responsive.

I wonder what a QtJava app will run like when it is compiled using GCJ and GNU Classpath to a native executable. And I wonder what it will code like since the experiences I had so far with Java in Eclipse where amazing, it felt like Eclipse and I where coding together. Programming in Qt style C++ is nice, but personally I'd prefer a highler level language like Java (with a garbage collector and no worries over pointers, references and build systems).

Qt does not use Exceptions because of portability issues (iirc), will there be some Exceptions added in the Java bindings? I hope so.

My final thought is: What about a Qt-SWT bridge? IBM supposedly worked on such a bridge but cancelled it. Many is said about this. Since SWT is seems to become the usefull standard GUI package in the Java world, it would be nice if SWT apps looked cute in KDE.