[jsword-devel] RCP/SWT

[Aleksander Rozman]

DM Smith wrote:
>
>
> Aleksander Rozman wrote:
>
> 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.
>
Yeah I noticed that. I tried to run build on 1.3 and it didn't work. 
There are a lot of assert statements which are not available in 1.3, 
which means that running witj JRE 1.3 shouldn't work either. Could usage 
of asserts be removed? I haven't used assertions so far, because I never 
found the need to use them. Is there a need to use them in BibleDesktop?


>> 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.
>
Do that. I will try bible desktop on my unix machine (notebook pentium 
with 96 Mb ram) with java 1.4.2 and will tell you how it works there....
>> 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.
>
This is because it uses just awt and not swing. As I remember SWT is 
fancy replacement for Swing, but this comes with a price, your platform 
needs to support it. I use Azureus which runs on SWT 3.1, and it takes 
quite a lot of RAM, and it also runs quite slowly on machine with just 
512 Mb ram. I also tried it on 128 Mb run where it runs even slower, it 
is stoping the system from working like it should....

Take care,
Andy