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RE: [platform-swt-dev] Re: FW: SWT History and Design Decisions ( WAS: [platform-swt-dev] AWT Toolkit using SWT (was: From Swing to SWT))
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Title: Message
Hi
Lane,
First, I am not absolutely certain that multiple choices for a SWT GUI
Builder is bad. If there ends up a couple of Builder choices down the road,
this may make SWT and Eclipse more vibrant. <<SNIP>>
Perhaps I didn't communicate clearly enough: We don't disagree on the
point you raise above. To the contrary, we agree that there is room for
many SWT GUI builders and that choice and competition in the market is a good
thing! :-)
About a week ago, you were asking for input about how to
approach supporting SWT in your GUI builder. The official response from
the SWT team was, "Develop an adapter (or GUI builder API) layer."
However, upon reading that, our
concern was that if (for
example) you write a SWT GUI builder API layer and we write a separate SWT
GUI builder API layer and Scott and Ramen also write their own SWT API layers for their
respective SWT GUI builders, that a market for third-party SWT custom
controls will never succeed. This is because third party custom
control authors would be forced to decide what GUI builders to support, thus fragmenting the market for SWT custom
controls. Consequently, the market for the GUI builders
themselves would be likely to remain small because the usefulness
of a GUI builder is partially related to the wealth of its corresponding
third-party custom control market.
To
mitigate this risk to all of us, Advanced Systems Concepts would like to work
together with all other GUI builder authors such as yourself, Scott, and Ramen
to agree on a common SWT API layer that we all will support.
We also believe that such a layer ideally belongs inside Eclipse itself
rather than maintained and managed by any of our respective
companies.
The
result was that (as one of the other developers on the list put it), we put our
money where our mouth is:
Since
we had already created a GUI builder API layer for SWT, we open-sourced it as a
starting point for everyone's Eclipse GUI builder API and opened bug #30022
as a place for public comment on the matter. We attached the complete
source code (licensed under the CPL) to the bug report and invite your, Scott's,
Ramen's, and anybody else's comments.
Coming back to where we started this whole discussion:
about a week ago you asked for input about how to approach supporting SWT
in your GUI builder. Now you don't even have to develop the layer the SWT
team proposed. It's available to you, free for the taking under the same
license terms as you got Eclipse itself. :-)
If you
don't like something in the API, let's discuss your concerns on
Bugzilla. We can all decide by vote which ideas to include in the final
API. And hopefully, our friends in SWT development will see fit to
include our collective result as part of Eclipse itself.
;-)
Let's write some great code together.
I apologize if my previous post was unclear about our intentions.
:-)
Best
Regards,
Dave
Orme
Advanced Systems Concepts
PS:
I'll post a similar message momentarily on e.tools so all stakeholders will have
fair notice of this opportunity.