Re: [ajug-members]: Swing or SWT?

[Sudarshan Raghavan <bali_n@yahoo.com>]

The biggest problem with SWT is resource management.
Widgets are emulated in Swing and resource disposal is
taken care of by the JRE garbage collector. SWT relies
on the developer to explicitly dispose OS-dependent
objects. I have used both Swing and SWT and believe
me, with SWT, developers can shoot themselves in the
foot if they don't pay attention to resource
management. Memory utilization can go through the roof
and unpredictable errors result when an object tries
to access an already disposed item. The SWT code for
Windows is production quality but the same cannot be
said about the Linux, Solaris and MAC versions. Agreed
SWT is the new "zing thing", but Swing with its broad
class hierarchy, pluggable L&F and MVC approach is
much more sophisticated. 

If your application is small, cross-platform L&F is
not an issue and you want to try something new, SWT is
a good choice. But for complex GUIs, I would prefer
the more conservative option.

My 2 cents ...

-- Sudarshan


--- Robert Gash <gashalot@gashalot.com> wrote:
> John Wells wrote:
> > I would like to develop this particular app in
> Java, but am unsure
> > what our best option is.  The app will quite
> honestly never be run on
> > any other platform other than Windows, and I'd
> like to make the look
> > and feel as Window-y as possible.
> > 
> > speed increase as well as native look and feel,
> while potentially
> > sacrificing some portability.
> > 
> > The final important requirement in our case is
> keeping the package
> > the GUI is distributed in as small as possible. 
> I'm not certain, but
> > I suspect that packaging the SWT libs along with
> the app could
> > increase package size substantially.
> > 
> > Anyone on the list faced this decision before? 
> What did you decide
> > or what would you suggest?
> 
> A while ago we faced the same sort of decision at a
> small company I used 
> to work for.  We were developing a prototype
> application that 
> demonstrated the capabilities of a new product, and
> we wanted to mimic 
> the "native" look and feel of the platform as much
> as possible.
> 
> Eclipse had been stable with the 2.x series releases
> for a while, and we 
> were up for a learning challenge, so we chose SWT. 
> Although there 
> weren't many docs about SWT at the time (only a pile
> of code snippets 
> and an API), I had no problems picking it up in a
> few hours.
> 
> My original impressions were very positive.  They
> have used a lot of 
> nifty tricks in SWT.  The API is pretty consistent,
> the method names are 
> the same, and they do what you'd expect them to,
> which leads me into 
> what I think is the most profound thing I discovered
> when working with 
> SWT: it just worked.  I'll admit, Swing isn't
> exactly rocket science, 
> but I found my self looking like the guy in the
> Troll Tech logo more 
> than once when I wrote some code, ran it, and the UI
> did exactly what I 
> expected.  Unfortunately for Swing, I can't say I
> have always enjoyed 
> such smooth sailing.
> 
> Another feature of SWT I enjoyed was the simple,
> powerful, yet intuitive 
> FormLayout manager.  It combines most of the power
> of Swing's GridBag 
> with a relatively simple interface that is pretty
> enjoyable to write by 
> hand.  It's a shame Sun never did anything quite
> like this when I was 
> using Swing...
> 
> And for those stalwarts out there who will
> undoubtedly say "you lose the 
> ability to use all of the wonderful pre-built
> components for Swing," the 
> 3.0 SWT drops have support for using AWT (and, by
> induction, Swing) 
> components inside of an SWT application.  I have
> used it with JFreeChart 
> with much success (even the Swing printing worked
> flawlessly).
> 
> With respect to size concerns, SWT will add about
> 1.5mb to your 
> distribution, which isn't a whole lot for what you
> get (the native 
> look/feel on any platform, not just Sun's attempt to
> clone it).  Either 
> way, it is definitely worth a second look.
> 
> SWT resources:
>
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-swt-home/dev.html
> 
> Swing widgets in SWT:
>
http://www.jfree.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4693&highlight=swt
> 
> -- 
> Robert Gash (Vice President, AJUG)
> gashalot@gashalot.com, http://www.gashalot.com
> AIM: gashalot, Jabber: gashalot@jabber.org, Yahoo:
> gashalot
> 


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