Re: SWT History and Design Decisions (WAS: [platform-swt-dev] AWT Toolki

[David Whiteman <dlwhiteman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thursday, January 16, 2003, 3:46:44 PM, Brad O'Hearne wrote:

> Hey all,

> I believe this past post is a good segue into a question I have, and
> that is the history of SWT from a design standpoint.  I have been able
> to find Eclipse history, but none pertaining to specifically to SWT.  It
> is interesting to note that SWT (presumably, since Eclipse started with
> IBM) has its origins in IBM, but also that the original announcement of
> JFC back in 1997 at JavaOne introduced JFC as a joint effort between
> Sun, Netscape, *and* IBM.  So if IBM was involved in both JFC and SWT,
> what gave cause to IBM to pursue a different path than Swing, and create
> SWT?  Were there specific problems (performance, interoperability, etc.)
> in Swing viewed as too big to overlook, or a difference in opinions on
> design that caused IBM to pursue a different direction?  If Swing was a
> joint effort, why not just change Swing?  Following, once that decision
> was made to create SWT, what were the key issues in the design
> discussions, and what determined the final design of SWT?

The way I understand it, JFC's parts were wholly owned by the various
companies.  IBM's Taligent, a separate company at the time,
contributed some graphics code, but was not involved in other parts of
JFC.

SWT originally was developed by OTI as an internal toolkit for use in
building its VisualAge Micro Edition IDE.  The SWT API evolved out of
the widget classes found in VisualAge Smalltalk.  At the time of its
development, Swing was limping along at version 1.0, and OTI was able
to build SWT quickly due to the fact that it was essentially a port
from its Smalltalk work.  I.e. I don't think the original intent was
to develop a reusable externally available toolkit.  But since it
turned out so well, it seemed like something others would want: a good
performing widget toolkit that used a mix of native and custom
widgets.

-- 
Regards,
David                            
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