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1.0 Requirements

This proposal is based upon an (incomplete) earlier work undertaken in 1996 to specify a Uniform Data Transfer Mechanism, Clipboard, and Drag and Drop facilities for AWT.

The AWT implementation in JDK1.1 introduced the Uniform Data Transfer Mechanism and the Clipboard protocol. This draft proposal defines the API for the Drag and Drop facilities for JDK1.2 based upon, but extending these 1.1 UDT API's.

The primary requirements that this proposal addresses, are:

  1. Provision of a platform independent Drag and Drop facility for Java GUI clients implemented through AWT and JFC classes.
  2. Integration with platform dependent Drag and Drop facilities, permitting Java clients to be able to participate in DnD operation with native applications using:
  3. Support for 100% pure JavaOS/Java implementation.
  4. Leverages the existing java.awt.datatransfer.* package to enable the transfer of
  5. data, described by an extensible data type system based on the MIME standard.
  6. Does not preclude the use of "accessibility" features where available.
  7. Extensible to support diverse input devices.
The proposal derives from the previous work mentioned above, but incorporates significant differences from that original work as a result of the advent of the JavaBeans event model, Lightweight Components, and an increasing understanding of the cross-platform integration and interoperability issues.



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