Re: SWT or Swing GUI?

[Robert Gash <gashalot@gashalot.com>]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 15:36:48 -0400, Lee Chalupa was overheard saying:
|  As long as SWT still provides platform independence, what is the downside 
|  of using SWT?  One maybe the lack of gui tools?  One maybe the risk that 
|  Sun will improve swing in the future and eliminate the benefits SWT 
|  provides making the need obsolete?  One maybe lack of educational 
|  materials?  One maybe the limited variety of widgets offered in the 
|  toolkit.

Lee,

I recently finished working on several systems that we built around
SWT.  We chose SWT because the native widget response makes the
application "feel" quicker, even though it is the same JVM in the
back.

If you are writing a "pure" application that contains no third party
UI components, you are almost 100% safe using SWT, provided you don't
mind doing some digging and newsgroup posting to get answers to hard
questions (here's and exercise: try to find the SWT "homepage").  A
lot of little things in SWT make it a very friendly toolkit that can
be much easier to use than Swing/AWT (tables, tabs, etc).  I was very
impressed with the consistency of the API, even on the little things
like setText().

However, if you really like having good third-party documentation,
hope to use third party UI widgets/components, or want to use any sort
of freely/widely available UI building tool, Swing is probably still
your best choice.

-R

PS: Some of the issues with third party components can be overcome
with the new SWT_AWT bridge.  Dig into our mail archive for my
previous answer describing the new SWT_AWT bridge and how you can use
it to integrate AWT and Swing components into SWT applications.

-- 
Robert Gash, gashalot@gashalot.com
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