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

[Steve_Northover@xxxxxxxxxx]

Lane, please read the description of SWT at http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-swt-home/main.html.

Lane Sharman <lane@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent by: platform-swt-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx 01/15/03 10:24 PM Please respond to platform-swt-dev

To:        platform-swt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx         cc:                 Subject:        Re: [platform-swt-dev] From Swing to SWT

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




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