Would the Swing Team Consider?

Published on by Francis Adu-Gyamfi

I’m not one for official things, as I guess several people in the IT industry are so I have not bothered to proceed with the paper work on something I have been considering.
Down over the Sun Java Forum (http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5395676) I posted a question recently about the Motif Look and Feel implementation in Java. Basically, I was wondering whether the Swing Team would consider removing it from the JRE Distribution and probably making a separate JAR download perhaps (or removing it completely in my opinion)

Basically, the reason I advocate for this is the fact that I do not believe the Motif Look and Feel is as popular as it used to be. From my very limited however extensive search online for Java Applets and application screen shots, I have very rarely come across the Motif Look and Feel being used in a production level application. I believe back in the day, when look and feels were still in their infancy, it was much used, but today when we have shiny new look and feels and better OS Look and Feel implementations, the Motif Look and Feel is slowing fading in to just a memory for old time PC enthusiasts (no pun intended).

All I’m asking is that the Swing Team should consider removing this legacy UI from the JRE to distributions, simply because

  1. It sucks as compared to modern look and feels
  2. It adds to the JRE Distribution size and will probably never be used for much more than JDK Demos

I’ve read that the motif Look and Feel is some sort of Standard, but we developers need to consider the modern users. With IPhones, JavaFX, Flash, Silverlight and the many other flashy UI applications running around these days, having anything in the JRE distribution that does not help the Java cause when it comes to competing with modern standards, is not beneficial.

I suggest that with upcoming modularization effort, the Motif Look and Feel should be moved out of the core JRE to help reduce its download size and possibly footprint (I think I’m wrong about the footprint part).

Anyways that is my rant.