RE: [platform-swt-dev] AWT Toolkit using SWT (was: From Swing to SWT)

[Dave Orme <DaveO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Message

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Foster [mailto:bob@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 7:50 PM
To: platform-swt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [platform-swt-dev] AWT Toolkit using SWT (was: From Swing to SWT)

These two or three threads inspired by Lane's remarks seem excessively philosophical for this list. So far I have seen two proposals that would make SWT more "GUI builder friendly".

 

- An abstraction layer over SWT and AWT/Swing

- Support for AWT/Swing within SWT

In deference to Lane, I'd have to add a third: something based on the Decorator pattern that adds the needed features to each SWT Widget class.  (I personaly think that this is the only reasonable way to handle this problem that both respects SWT's design as a thin wrapper around the operating system's GUI "objects" and gives the GUI builder designers what they need.)

Abstraction layers are not SWT-like. I doubt you'll find much support for that.

 

AWT/Swing within SWT should be supported for a lot of reasons, but this isn't one of them. This just makes SWT friendly to Swing GUI builders, it doesn't provide a GUI builder for SWT.

 

Awhile ago I proposed adding (a handful of) property getters and setters that would make widgets more beanlike. (Forget the constructor thing; that's not an issue.) As long as objects can be serialized to some sort of stream and reconstructed by reading that stream USING THE EXTERNAL API, GUI builders have what they need.

 

Bob

----- Original Message -----

From: Christian Gruber

To: platform-swt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 5:37 PM

Subject: RE: [platform-swt-dev] AWT Toolkit using SWT (was: From Swing to SWT)

Right on!!! That's the way you do it. ;)

 

Cg.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: platform-swt-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:platform-swt-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Lane Sharman
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 4:05 PM
To: platform-swt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [platform-swt-dev] AWT Toolkit using SWT (was: From Swing to SWT)

 

Bongo, FreeBongo, and now Conga radically cuts the programming out of the GUI construction phase: the content designer is essentially drawing java objects without knowledge that he is manipulating a hierarchy of java instances.