Thomas Boshell

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since Jul 07, 2004
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Recent posts by Thomas Boshell

The Eclipse PDE (Plugin Development Environment) comes with some good documentation in the Eclipse Help. On the Eclipse site there are also some good getting started tutorials. Make sure that you also have the sources for Eclipse, that way you can easily look up examples (using the Search) and references for methods/classes. Great way to see how they do things.
embedding Swing in SWT. Could be a possibility. I know the problems with mixing Swing and AWT, heavyweight and lightweight controls. I love the arguements that Sun uses against SWT. I think it makes them nervous. They argued the point that it did not make any sense for IBM to develop SWT (uses native object like AWT but only better, maybe one could say correctly?) since they helped to develop Swing as a replacement for the limitations for AWT. But then I did some thinking on it and decided that it is not a problem if they did it correctly, which it looks like they did. Now to the question, if one mixes Swing and SWT together (also possible with Swing and AWT but not advisable) what possible problems must one be aware of?
19 years ago
The thing I like most about Swing is the amount of documentation, tutorials, and examples. True, Swing has been around longer, but the documentation really helps and it is easily accessable. I have looked into trying out SWT and decided to look through documentations and was a bit dissappointed. I had the feeling that most of my time would be spent on looking for the documents. Maybe I have become a bit too used to having the JavaDocs and standard tutorials readily accessible. There is also a wealth of advanced articles on Swing development. But for SWT I mainly see the equivalent of "Hello World" examples. Sure that is a great way to start but is a bit lacking.

Then for the longest the SWT library had been primarily for Windows. I have heard that it now functions on Linux, but it matured in Windows. That held me back for a while from taking it too seriously, now I am taking it serious. Eclipse looks great.

Another thing that I have read about is that SWT does not really embrase the MVC convention. That at times it becomes a real hassel to have the view objects work with the data. I have a Swing app that I have been developing that performs a lot of work with tables and if I could not control the table the way I need to then it is of no value to me. I did try (I think I was using version 2.something) to develop a plug-in as a quick test and had a frustrating time with where I wanted the table...I wanted the table as a editor but could never get it recognized as an editor (center area). Frustrating. That is the advantage that I see with Swing, I can modify the controls the way I need them and can in effect create any type of new control that my heart desires. It is all about making new controls.

In conclusion I can say that I am divided. Swing I can control in ways that I have not seen in SWT. SWT looks better. Swing has more documentation. I have not really noticed any performace problems with SWT, but in Swing's defense a slow Swing program is a good sign of some lazy programming.
19 years ago