FW: suggestions to improve AWT (mostly Linux related)

[Sjoerd Brauer]

From: Sjoerd Brauer
Sent: woensdag 13 januari 2021 09:54
To: 'quality-discuss at openjdk.java.net' <quality-discuss at openjdk.java.net>
Subject: suggestions to improve AWT (mostly Linux related)

Dear all,

I've been working with a Raspbian CLI environment for a while and notice some unexpected behavior from AWT.Robot.
Java registers the Raspbian CLI as a headless environment even though it can be accessed directly through a keyboard and mouse (I did as well).
When fooling the java environment by setting the headless property to false it throws X11 errors because it relies on an X server to do the IO stuff.

This is the part where I believe AWT can be improved.
Yes I understand AWT exists for creating a GUI and CLI is not considered a GUI.
Yes I understand and agree that because using a CLI some AWT related stuff should not work.
Even though this is the case there already exists some exceptions of using AWT in a headless environment as described by Oracle:
https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/javase/headless.html (I'm assuming OpenJDK shares this behavior but I didn't test this).

I suggest the following improvements to the AWT.

  *   Don't make IO simulation classes like AWT.Robot rely on the X-Server but make it work directly on the OS IO system.
     *   https://pypi.org/project/keyboard/ is a great example on how you could do this (albeit written in python).
  *   Separate the headless exception into headless and a new CLIEnvironment exception.

Because the AWT is part of the Java Foundation Classes I'm writing this to you.

Hopefully you find my feedback useful.

Kind regards,

Sjoerd Brauer


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