Subject: Eric Hawkes: Java and fvwm

From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 23:09:59 -0400

Heres some information on the FVWM JAVA
problems from Eric Hawkes at Sun.  It looks
like they have some fixes coming, and we can do
some stuff to improve our Java support.

Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 17:08:12 -0700
From: Eric Hawkes <[email-masked]>
Organization: Sun Microsystems
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Java and fvwm

Hi Dan, 

...

Much of the code that handles window manager 
interaction has recently been reworked, and we 
expect that Java GUI applications will work 
better under fvwm in our next beta release: 
J2SE v1.4 beta3 (planned for release in a 
month or so).  

There has been some internal debate over the 
best way to support fvwm.  One opinion was that 
we needed a way to detect it programmatically.  
Many window managers support the freedesktop.org 
window manager spec:  
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/wm-spec.html 
We detect some window managers explicitly using 
_NET_SUPPORTING_WM_CHECK 

Another proposed strategy was to write more 
general code for the case where we cannot 
explicitly detect the running window manager.  
This is the method we now use for fvwm.  

...

Thanks, 

Eric Hawkes
--
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---

From: Sidik Isani <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 19:19:38 -1000 (HST)

Hello -

  Before you read the rest: I *not* just here to complain...
  I'll post a patch tomorrow, which seems to be providing
  us a reasonable solution for making Java work for now.

Dan Espen forwarded Eric Hawkes as saying:
|Another proposed strategy was to write more 
|general code for the case where we cannot 
|explicitly detect the running window manager.  
|This is the method we now use for fvwm.  

  !!! Better late than never.  It seems to me like this should
  always have been the default.  If you want to have maximum
  compatibility, yet still enable fancy features a fancier window
  manager can deal with, then the default should clearly be the
  SIMPLE behavior unless it can be verified that said fancier
  window system is present... not the other way around.

  But for us, switching to some future-ware beta version in
  the hopes that these problems will go away (and yet unknown
  ones will creep in) is not an option.  And switching to
  another window manager is Really not an option!  FVWM is
  great, simple, and stable, and works with everything... except
  Java.  These problems have been around since (at least) 1999,
  and the solution seems so obvious (assume *basic* behavior if
  no specific window manager is detected.)  I'm not thrilled to
  have added my time to the cumulative time that must have been
  spent dealing with this over the years.

Be seeing you,

- Sidik