This is an AWT peformance RFE for Kestrel.

Right now when a user double clicks on an icon to launch
a GUI Swing app, there is often a multi-second delay before
there is any visual feedback that the app is starting.
  
This tends to cause users to be confused. People aren't sure
that they double-clicked correctly, or if anything is happening.

The problem is that we have to load the core pieces of the JVM,
awt, swing, etc., before we enter the application and it can start
painting pixels.

It would be good to provide faster GUI feedback to the user that
the application is starting.

One way to do that would be to push up a splash screen from the
"C" code at the start of the java and javaw commands, before we
load the JVM or any other such slow operations.

So we might provide a new flag "-splash" that takes an image file
as an argument and causes java/javaw to immediately pop up a
window with that image. That will allows app developers to
provide their own splash screen image for each app.

Issues include:
   How to we get rid of the spash screen? We probably need to
   register it with awt.dll and then when the user app first
   calls "show" on a Windows we can pull down the splash screen.

   What image formats should we support? GIF would be nice, but
   that might require us to pull in too much code, and the whole
   value of this trick is to be *fast*. It would be good if we
   can use a format that will be easy to implement cross platfom.

   It's easy to get carried away. It might be nice to allow
   animations or to allow at least ticker-tape messages at the
   bottom of the image. But this will probably all get too
   complicated. Let's keep the first version simple!


graham.hamilton@Eng 1999-06-18