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

[David Whiteman <dlwhiteman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Monday, January 20, 2003, 1:06:45 PM, Brad O'Hearne wrote:

> Thanks for the clarifying post on the issue of GUI builders.  I know
> that this thread, and its original thread have kind of gotten melded
> into one, but to re-track this thread on SWT history (which I started),
> I am curious as to how IBM came to endorse SWT (David Whiteman mentioned
> that OTI was the original developer of SWT) if IBM was one of the
> original 3 (along with Sun and Netscape) that were behind Swing (or more
> broadly, JFC).

Note that the following is my personal perspective, and does not
reflect Steve's perspective or any official opinion of IBM.

IBM isn't endorsing SWT per se.  It's the media that's making it a SWT
vs. Swing competition.  SWT was a toolkit developed because Swing did
not meet the Eclipse designers requirements *for Eclipse*.  SWT is not
being marketed to be the solution to everyone's needs, nor is it being
marketed against Swing (for that matter, I don't believe SWT is being
marketed at all).  It just was a reliable API that helped OTI produce
a fantastic platform, and was opened up so that others could develop
plugins for Eclipse.

> Somewhere along the line, there had to be some discussion or
> consideration of using Swing with Eclipse.  If not, then that says that
> the design of Swing was not acceptable to IBM, the original authors of
> Eclipse.

Actually, Eclipse *and* SWT were created by OTI.  OTI did attempt to
use Swing to develop an IDE written in Java, but the performance and
look-and-feel were not desirable.

> But as members of the contingent that authored JFC, did IBM
> have any discussions with Sun regards to the design of Swing, or more
> recently, to IBM promoting SWT over Swing?

I don't really know anything about this.

> My purpose is not to pit Sun
> vs. IBM, it just seems that since the announcement of JFC in 1997, the
> philosophy of approach to GUI widgets has swung from agreement in
> approach (JFC) between Sun / IBM to a difference in approach (SWT vs.
> Swing).

Again, IBM isn't pushing any particular GUI widget philosophy.  If you
want to create a plugin for Eclipse, you should use SWT.  However,
it's up to you to decide what you want to use for your apps.
 
> Is this an accurate read on the situation, or am I missing something?
> For the purpose of demonstrating the pragmatic importance of this
> question, suppose I am a CTO, in charge of producing a new rich GUI
> application that I am going to be investing millions of dollars in.
> What technology do I invest in and why?  Do I invest in the technology
> that the authors of the Java platform tout, or an alternative?  A CTO
> wants to invest in the technology that has industry support, and so I
> think this historical clarification is probably important.
 
SWT is critical to Eclipse, and Eclipse is critical to IBM and the
other board members, so you can be assured that it will receive full
attention.  Similarly, Sun has an interest in Swing, so I expect that
they will continue to support that technology.  There are different
needs that might lead one to choose SWT for one project and Swing for
another.  I don't think choice is always a bad thing.

-- 
Regards,
David                            
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