swinging java in compiz fusion (which sucks)

I’ve always been a flamboyant soul and I would always want my workspace to reflect that. Ever since I’ve touched a linux box with Beryl and Compiz (now merged to become Compiz Fusion), I know I’ll never go back to boring 2D desktop ever again.

I never really had any problems doing Java development with all the 3D glory switched on. I am aware of a stinky bug though that the reference Java implementation had snobbed for quite a while. Never affected me coz I never use Swing applications anyway. Of course until now.

After deciding on using Grails for this project, it seems that all roads to development leads to IntelliJ Idea and “the most mature” Groovy/Grails plugin JetGroovy. You see, I’ve been a long time Eclipse user. But I need to get things done. And I couldn’t care less about IDE-religion.

As soon as I launched the IDE (which happens to be a Swing app) in my pc, lo and behold, it’s 2006 again. Fucking gray boxes. Reincarnated. Shit. I would never turn off 3D desktop (and I just mentioned I need to get things done :p ).

So, as the very pragmatic person that I am, I left noisyheads development first just to solve this pimping my desktop issue. The first attempt led me to exporting this environment variable:

AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

Which, worked. Until text areas lost focus every damn minute!

Next attempt, move to OpenJDK! Installed it, fired the IDE. Hey, no gray areas. Windows resizing correctly. Fonts sucks big time! Sheesh. It’s like ants marched in and bit all the letters. Could have lived with it. But the freezing did it. The crappy swing implementation is expected. I believe it’s one of the proprietary components of the ri that need to be reimplented still. Need to move on.

From the bug comments, it was mentioned that the jdk6 beta, specifically build 24, had this finally addressed. Went to download site, and got me build 25. Extracted it, moved to /usr/local/lib. Symlinked the bin directory to /usr/local/bin. Exported JDK_HOME and JAVA_HOME. Then fired Idea. What do you know? Finally a decent Swing app on Compiz Fusion.

Yes, I know what a mature developer/entreprenuer I’m starting to become. Fucking prioritization. Ugh. Will never work on 2D desktop I’m telling you. (Until I get a Mac one of these days 😉 )