Re: [platform-swt-dev] Support for JSR-198 (was SWT port for Swing!)

["Bob Foster" <bob@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Bob Foster" <bob@xxxxxxxxxx>
> JSR 198 is a political maneuver designed, in part, to blunt the effect of
> Eclipse in the tools marketplace. Anything done under this banner is
> busywork to please the pointy-haired bosses.

Gee, it was so much fun writing that, I hate to retract it.

But I've since been in contact with people closer to the origins of JSR 198
and the instigators' motives were much more innocent. They simply wanted
more plugins to be able to run in their developer tools. The SWT-Swing thing
came up later.

Since I've always believed that Eclipse would attract more plugins if it
supported Swing-within-SWT on all platforms, and I _think_ this is in the
plan for 3.0, that isn't the pointy-haired part of JSR 198. The real
problem, IMHO, is that while they all do somewhat the same thing, IDEs are
very different inside and it will be hard to find an emulation layer
sufficiently powerful to be useful, or used. And if it's not going to be
used - remember Java Beans serialization as a required feature of tools
support? - it's just a waste of good developer time. Of course, people who
develop Windows applications entirely in POSIX might disagree. ;-}

Bob