XWayland server provides limited capabilities for X11 desktop applications (see X11 Application Support  and JDK-8269245). In order to get full support of the desktop features, we need to implement a pure Wayland client toolkit for java. Wayland architecture in many ways differs from X11, so we cannot reuse XAWT even for basic capabilities. The new toolkit should be implemented from scratch. Here are some major chunks of work:

• Event handling

• Dispatch native events on EDT, to avoid potential race conditions when the state is updated both from EDT and toolkit thread. See the full proposal here  

• Graphics devices support

• Onscreen/offscreen Wayland surface management

• Adopt OGL pipeline for rendering on Wayland surfaces

• Implement a new rendering pipeline based on Vulkan (for better performance)

• java.awt.Robot

• Sending input events

• Reading screen data (at least current java application windows)

• Client-side decorations for windows

• Swing internal frames rendering code can be reused

The prototype implementation of the pure Wayland toolkit (JDK-8281970) can be found in the Wakefield repository (pure_wl_toolkit branch). It uses software rendering loops to draw geometry primitives on Wayland surfaces. It supports the rendering of AWT Frame and Swing JFrame.

Text rendering is not yet supported (JDK-8281285)