Internet Foundation Classes

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

The Java IFC was fairly close to the early versions of the Objective-C NeXTStep classes for NeXT. A builder tool was also included under the IFC umbrella that was close in spirit (but significantly limited in functionality) to NeXT's Interface Builder. This ecosystem was attractive to NeXT application developers interested in looking at the Java language.

History

On April 2, 1997, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced their intention to combine IFC with other technologies to form the Java Foundation Classes. ^[1]

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Because its technology has been merged to constitute Swing and Java 2D, IFC is now no longer maintained.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

Swing drew 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, ^[2] but it was a bit complex, and not compatible with the Java Serialization API.
• event mechanism was still raw, ^[3] and the Event loop sometimes needed to be accessed directly.

Examples

Hello World

This is the classic Hello world program in IFC:

importnetscape.application.*;importnetscape.util.*;publicclassHelloWorldextendsApplication{publicvoidinit(){super.init();// Create a text fieldTextFieldtextField=newTextField(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.publicstaticvoidmain(Stringargs[]){HelloWorldapp=newHelloWorld();ExternalWindowmainWindow=newExternalWindow();app.setMainRootView(mainWindow.rootView());Sizesize=mainWindow.windowSizeForContentSize(320,200);mainWindow.sizeTo(size.width,size.height);mainWindow.show();app.run();}}

To be compared with the equivalent Java Swing code:

importjavax.swing.*;publicclassHelloWorldextendsJFrame{publicHelloWorld(){setDefaultCloseOperation(DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE);add(newJLabel("Hello, World!"));}publicstaticvoidmain(String[]args){HelloWorldapp=newHelloWorld();app.pack();app.setVisible(true);}}

References

1. "Sun and Netscape to jointly develop Java Foundation Classes". Netscape Communications Corporation. 1997-04-02. Archived from the original on 2012-05-09. Retrieved 2007-07-14.
2. "IFC 1.1 guide - Persistence". 2000-06-15. Archived from the original on 2006-11-25. Retrieved 2007-07-15.
3. "IFC 1.1 guide - Targets and commands". 2000-06-15. Archived from the original on 2006-11-25. Retrieved 2007-07-15.

External links

• IFC presentation
• IFC runtime download Archived 2006-05-19 at the Wayback Machine
• IFC programming guide Archived 2006-11-25 at the Wayback Machine
• IFC class hierarchy Archived 2006-11-25 at the Wayback Machine
• IFC tutorial Archived 2006-11-25 at the Wayback Machine

The last places, where to download the IFC:

• ftp-Server 1 Uni-Potsdam ^{[ permanent dead link ]}
• ftp-Server 2 Uni-Potsdam ^{[ permanent dead link ]}
• ftp-Server 3 Uni-Potsdam ^{[ permanent dead link ]}
• ftp-Server Uni-Bochum ^{[ permanent dead link ]}
• ftp-Server SunSite ^{[ permanent dead link ]}

All find from

• FileSearching.com ^{[ permanent dead link ]}

The web-archive where is the last place to find really all files:

• WebArchive of the IFC-side

Additional you can still find IFC here:

• Server of the MIT - Nathans account
• Server of the MIT - stuff side