Re: [platform-swt-dev] From Swing to SWT

[Lane Sharman <lane@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael,

I have been studying this problem for a while and do not see any clean 
solution. The problem is that neither j.a.Component & Container, nor 
o.e..swt.Widget and its descendants implement a meta data interface 
which makes inspection of properties of a widget possible. Thus a 
conversion tool or a Builder are hard to do for both Swing and SWT!

I have written a short expose on the subject of property and meta data 
in a GUI and there is a JSR on this very topic.

http://opendoors.com/conga/2.2/docs/property/siframes.html
is a little presentation I wrote on the importance of the property 
exchange pattern which allows two objects that have no prior knowledge 
of one another to establish a protocol (aka Interface) to exchange 
structured information. This is your case. You need a translator that 
has a protocol map that can look at the dynamic state of your Swing app 
(not the static code) and then use that property information to map to a 
corresponding SWT tool.

I really wish I could tweak the base class of the SWT to make it a 
little more GUI builder friendly along the lines of what I work with in 
Conga.

Everytime I study the base class of SWT, I become more frustrated. For 
example, it is very important that every widget have a local, relative 
name. There is no setName(), getName(). There is no 
setProperties(ProperyList), getProperties(PropertyList). Sigghhh.

-lane

Michael Privat wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I would be very interested to hear some opinions regarding a process to
> convert a swing based application to a SWT based application. I know
> there is some effort to create a standard SWT_AWT and vice versa
> container to allow mixing the two toolkits but I am interested in
> knowing if there are any patterns one might try to follow when
> converting to minimize the effort.
>
> Cheers
> Michael
>
>  

--
Lane Sharman
http://opendoors.com Conga, GoodTimes and Application Hosting Services
http://opendoors.com/lane.pdf BIO