Originally posted by Kashif Riaz:
Swing takes too long to render. Look at OpenOffice from Sun, it has an absolutely rubbish GUI (15-20 seconds to open a .doc). Now look at the Eclipse IDe, which is made from SWT. Very fast rendering.
I would not equate opening a .
doc file with Swing rendering performance. That is just ridiculous. I've seen several 'rendering benchmarks' between Swing and SWT none of which show any dramatic difference (depending on the JVM, OS, ect... sometimes Swing is faster, sometimes SWT is faster). I won't get into the OOo GUI as I'm not familiar with it's inner workings (although I use it quite often and have never thought of it as a bad unresponsive GUI).
Swing and SWT have different approaches to rendering and event handling. IMHO they are both good frameworks with different strengths and weaknesses. I would probably say that if you are looking at a primarily Windows app and you want 'better native look n' feel' you probably want to go with SWT, may even be faster. If you want to have more flexability in you components and don't mind a little lose in fidelity, or maybe even want your own look n' feel (some of the best apps I use don't conform to standard OS looks) then you probably want to use Swing. Generally I tend to use Swing because I'm more familiar with it.