Internet Foundation Classes

The Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) were a graphics library for Java originally developed by Netcode Corporation and first released by Netscape Corporation on December 16 1996.

History

On April 2 1997, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced their intention to combine IFC with other technologies to form the Java Foundation Classes [cite web
url=http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease378.html
title=Sun and Netscape to jointly develop Java Foundation Classes
publisher=Netscape Communications Corporation
date=1997-04-02
accessdate=2007-07-14] .

Ultimately, Sun merged the IFC with other technologies under the name "Swing", adding the capability for a pluggable look and feel of the widgets.

Because its technology has been merged to constitute Swing and Java 2D, IFC is now no longer maintained.

Differences with Swing

Swing draw a lot of features from IFC:
* contrary to AWT, IFC were written in pure Java, thus being (at the time) browser-independent.
* IFC already provided two Layout managers, that would be later included in the standard JDK
* some IFC components were able to read HTML content from URLs, but the implementation was still far from reliable.

However, Swing also improved IFC in a lot of ways:
* IFC did not have a Model-View architecture
* contrary to Swing, the Look and feel of IFC components was written in the components themselves, making it impossible to change it easily.
* IFC components were not JavaBeans. IFC had a specific persistence mechanism [cite web
url=http://infodoc.unicaen.fr/docs/Java/guide.IFC1.1/persist.mak.html#1004819
title=IFC 1.1 guide - Persistence
date=2000-06-15
accessdate=2007-07-15] , but it was a bit complex, and not compatible with the Java Serialization API.
* event mechanism was still raw [cite web
url=http://infodoc.unicaen.fr/docs/Java/guide.IFC1.1/targets.mak.html#100582
title=IFC 1.1 guide - Targets and commands
date=2000-06-15
accessdate=2007-07-15] , and the Event loop sometimes needed to be accessed directly.

Examples

Hello World

This is the classic "Hello world program" in IFC:import netscape.application.*;import netscape.util.*;

public class HelloWorld extends Application {

public void init() { super.init(); // Create a text field TextField textField = new TextField(100, 24, 128, 24); // Set the string to be displayed in the text field. textField.setStringValue("Hello World"); // Add the text field to the view hierarchy. mainRootView().addSubview(textField); }

// This method allows HelloWorld to run as a stand alone application. public static void main(String args [] ) { HelloWorld = new HelloWorld (); ExternalWindow mainWindow = new ExternalWindow(); Size size;

app.setMainRootView(mainWindow.rootView()); size = mainWindow.windowSizeForContentSize(320, 200); mainWindow.sizeTo(size.width, size.height); mainWindow.show();

app.run();

To be compared with the equivalent Java Swing code:import javax.swing.*;

public class HelloWorld extends JFrame { public HelloWorld() { super(); this.setDefaultCloseOperation (JFrame.DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE); Container pane = this.getContentPane(); pane.add(new JLabel("Hello, World!")); }

public static void main(String [] args) { HelloWorld app = new HelloWorld();

app.pack(); app.setVisible(true);

References

External links

* [http://www.phdcc.com/javaart2.html IFC presentation]
* [http://wp.netscape.com/eng/ifc/download.html IFC runtime download]
* [http://infodoc.unicaen.fr/docs/Java/guide.IFC1.1/ IFC programing guide]
* [http://infodoc.unicaen.fr/docs/Java/Reference.IFC1.1/tree.html IFC class hierarchy]
* [http://infodoc.unicaen.fr/docs/Java/cookbook/ IFC tutorial]

The last places, where to download the IFC:
* [ftp://ftp.uni-potsdam.de/pub/WWW/Netscape/navigator/plugins/ifc/1.0/ ftp-Server 1 Uni-Potsdam]
* [ftp://ftp.uni-potsdam.de/pub/WWW/clients/netscape/plugins/ifc/1.0/ ftp-Server 2 Uni-Potsdam]
* [ftp://ftp.uni-potsdam.de/pub/WWW/netscape/navigator/plugins/ifc/1.0/ ftp-Server 3 Uni-Potsdam]
* [ftp://ftp.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/.subdisc1/local/jk.collection/ ftp-Server Uni-Bochum]
* [ftp://ftp.anu.edu.au/sunsite/mnt/disk3/WWW/netscape/navigator/plugins/ifc/1.0/ ftp-Server SunSite] All find from
* [http://www.filesearching.com/cgi-bin/s?q=nsifc10 FileSearching.com]