Internet Foundation Classes

The Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) is a 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.

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

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Because its technology has been merged to constitute Swing and Java 2D, IFC is now no longer maintained.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

However, Swing also improved IFC in a lot of ways:

This is the classic Hello world program in IFC:

To be compared with the equivalent Java Swing code:

The last places, where to download the IFC:

All find from

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

Additional you can still find IFC here:

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