Name: eh37734 Date: 02/14/2002
In the X11 community, there is currently wide support for only two
Drag and Drop protocols: Motif Drag and Drop, and XDND. Some of the
other protocols, such as OffiX and Amulet, lack the sophistication of
these two. For example, OffiX only allows a drag site to export one
flavor of data, and Amulet only works within a single application. And
although during the early battles over the Linux desktop additional
protocols on par with Motif Drag and Drop and XDND emerged, the
various Linux vendors appear to have abandoned all of these in favor
of XDND. This was the case, for example, with KDE's Xde protocol.
Currently, the AWT supports only the Motif Drag and Drop dynamic
protocol. This support is achieved in two ways: (1) If a Java
application uses the java.awt.dnd API, then the Java X11 native code,
translates this usage into Motif DnD API function calls; (2) In 1.3
and 1.3.1, several AWT heavyweight components provide default drag
behavior via the middle button. Some editable heavyweights provide
default drop behavior as well. The sets of such components were expanded
in Motif 2.0, so applications running with that library have broader default support than those with motif 1.4.
This will be necessary if a lightweight AWT is implemented.
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