1 IBM arunkumar.thondapu@in.ibm.com EclipseCon NA 2015 3/12/2015 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Arun Thondapu Eclipse SWT Project Co-Lead Equinox (Launcher) Committer IBM arunkumar.thondapu@in.ibm.com

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• Motivation
• Evolution of GTK+
• Porting SWT to GTK+ 3
• Challenges
• Solutions
• Collaboration
• WIP
• What’s Next ??
• Wayland support
• Broadway, HTML 5
• GTK+ 4

• Linux vs Others
• Significant changes in underlying windowing system (GTK+)
• Separate API and ABI incompatible streams
• How to be on the “bleeding edge”
• Need parallel streams of development and maintenance
• Open and diverse nature of Linux distributions = support for a large range of GTK+

versions

• Originally designed and used in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as

a replacement of the Motif toolkit.

• GTK+ 2.0
• improved text rendering using Pango
• a new theme engine
• improved accessibility using ATK
• complete transition to Unicode using UTF-8 strings
• more flexible API and new widgets
• usage of Cairo graphics library for rendering vector graphics (since version 2.8)

• GTK+ 3
• cairo drawing throughout, GDK no longer wraps the antiquated X11 drawing API
• modern input device handling via XInput2
• new theming API with CSS syntax for theme configuration and animations
• multiple backend support for GDK (including experimental support for Wayland and

HTML5)

• integration of D-Bus support in GIO
• use GIO for launching applications
• new widgets, such as a switch and an application chooser
• improved support for touch and gestures

• Primary goal was a seamless user experience on a wide variety of Linux versions

irrespective of underlying versions of GTK+ shipped by them.

• to be as backward compatible as possible
• in contrast to most native GTK+ apps including GNOME

libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 libswt-pi-gtk-****.so libswt-pi3-gtk-****.so libgtk-3.so.0

• Do not include individual headers
• Do not use deprecated symbols
• Use accessor functions instead of direct access
• Replace GDK_<keyname> with GDK_KEY_<keyname>
• Use GIO for launching applications instead of the gdk_spawn family of functions
• Use cairo for drawing
• GdkGC and GdkImage are removed
• gdk_draw family of functions are gone
• GtkWidget “expose-event” signal has been replaced by a new “draw” signal

• The modern GTK+ drawing model

• Many great and diverse contributions

from community (led by Red Hat team) towards the GTK+ 3 port

• Much more stable and usable now
• Please continue to test, report bugs

and contribute patches!

• Working on resolving most major outstanding problems before Mars
• Bugzilla summary tags – GTK3, GTK 3.10
• Lots more stuff being deprecated and replaced by GTK+
• GdkColor is being replaced by GdkRGBA
• Many enhancements as well but we may not be able to adopt right now, stability is

the major concern

• Lack of backwards-compatibility in major updates continues to be an issue
• Can we aggressively drop support for older versions of GTK+ 2.x?

• Mars drops support for GTK+ < 2.18
• How to find out which version of GTK+ is being used by my Eclipse or SWT

application?

• Use the Java property org.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.version
• Prevent linking against GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3.x in the same process
• Leads to unexpected hangs or hard-to-diagnose crashes

• Eclipse Mars
• GTK+ 3 always (assuming it is installed and available)
• Eclipse Luna, SR1 & SR2
• GTK+ < 3.10 => GTK3
• GTK+ >= 3.10 => GTK2

• Webkit is embedded by default on Linux but XULRunner is also supported
• libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 vs. libwebkitgtk-3.0-0
• libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 is not installed by default on some distros => Luna and

earlier do not have an active browser in Eclipse!

• libwebkit2gtk-3.0-25 vs. libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37
• XULRunner does not have a GTK+ 3 port yet…

• Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and

maintain.

• Origins in initial effort towards X12.
• Hardware and applications are constantly evolving, X11 extensions are unable to

fill in the gaps anymore.

• Design and build a new display server from scratch focusing on modern platforms.

• Wayland is a display protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C

library implementation of that protocol.

• Weston reference implementation is the only Wayland compositor as of now.
• Eliminates needless complexity and improves performance compared to X11.
• Smaller footprint.
• Designed to work well with non-PC interfaces (embedded devices, tablets and phones).
• Shipped on a number of embedded products, phones, and tablets.
• For the desktop, GNOME and KDE ports to Wayland (and of course the protocol

itself) are currently WIP.

• Rudimentary support available at

• Google Summer of Code 2014

• GDK Broadway backend provides support for displaying GTK+ applications in a

web browser, using HTML5 and web sockets.

• GDK_BACKEND = broadway
• http://127.0.0.1:8080
• Works only with GTK3
• Use multiple GTK+ applications in the same web browser window, by using the

Broadway server, broadwayd, that ships with GTK+.

• broadwayd :5
• BROADWAY_DISPLAY - Specifies the Broadway display number.
• BROADWAY_DISPLAY=:5 gedit

• Can SWT itself use web (HTML5) based elements to build the UI of the application

instead of the OS's native widgets?

• Eclipse running inside a web browser?
• Allows CSS customization of UI.
• Eclipse integration with Orion and Flux in a browser.

• Animations
• Effects
• Transformations
• Event bubbling
• No more GDK windows
• Multimedia

• Scene graph
• Improved CSS support
• Better cross-platform story
• Better support for application

development

• Touch and gesture support
• Focus on HIG

“GTK+ 4 shall be as rock-stable (and hence "boring") as GTK+ 2”

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