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RE: SWT History and Design Decisions (WAS: [platform-swt-dev] AWT Toolkit using SWT (was: From Swing to SWT))
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Title: Message
Steve,
Thanks
for the clarifying post on the issue of GUI builders. I know that this
thread, and its original thread have kind of gotten melded into one, but to
re-track this thread on SWT history (which I started), I am curious as to how
IBM came to endorse SWT (David Whiteman mentioned that OTI was the original
developer of SWT) if IBM was one of the original 3 (along with Sun and Netscape)
that were behind Swing (or more broadly, JFC).
Somewhere along the line, there had to be some discussion or
consideration of using Swing with Eclipse. If not, then that says that the
design of Swing was not acceptable to IBM, the original authors of
Eclipse. But as members of the contingent that authored JFC, did IBM have
any discussions with Sun regards to the design of Swing, or more
recently, to IBM promoting SWT over Swing? My purpose is not to pit Sun
vs. IBM, it just seems that since the announcement of JFC in 1997, the
philosophy of approach to GUI widgets has swung from agreement in
approach (JFC) between Sun / IBM to a difference in approach (SWT vs.
Swing).
Is
this an accurate read on the situation, or am I missing something? For the
purpose of demonstrating the pragmatic importance of this question, suppose I am
a CTO, in charge of producing a new rich GUI application that I am going to
be investing millions of dollars in. What technology do I invest in
and why? Do I invest in the technology that the authors of the Java
platform tout, or an alternative? A CTO wants to invest in the
technology that has industry support, and so I think this historical
clarification is probably important.
If
anyone has any insight, I would greatly appreciate
it.
BradO
Lane and others, SWT is a direct interface to the
operating system. As stated on the SWT component page, our intent is to
be as thin a layer as possible. Thus, it is unlikely that we will be
adding any low level support for GUI builders in the near future. We
consider functionality that does not directly correspond to anything the
operating system provides to be suspect.
We believe that the right answer at this point is to use adapters.
If this turns out to be an unworkable strategy, we can look at it
again.
Note: Through JSR 175, Sun
seems to be reexamining the issue of meta data outside of Java Beans. In
the long term, this might be the direction.
