Internet Foundation Classes

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Because its technology has been merged to constitute Swing and Java 2D, IFC is now no longer maintained.

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.

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 app = new HelloWorld ();
        ExternalWindow mainWindow = new ExternalWindow();

        app.setMainRootView(mainWindow.rootView());
        Size 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() {
       setDefaultCloseOperation(DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE);
       add(new JLabel("Hello, World!"));
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        HelloWorld app = new HelloWorld();
        app.pack();
        app.setVisible(true);
    }
}

• 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

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