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Re: [platform-swt-dev] SWT port for Swing!
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Lane Sharman wrote:
All the graphic modeling of widgets in pure java has been done a
couple of times.
This is an interesting idea, tho. A portable backend for SWT. Kinda
defeats the premise of SWT.
-Lane
Christian Gruber wrote:
If someone was going to make a "portable back-end" for SWT, it might be
better to make a straight-up Java2D raw implementation of button and
widget back-ends, without all the pluggable GUI stuff, since it's a drag
on performance, and you're limiting it by using SWT anyway.
It's a cool idea, but you could actually make a high-performance
portable SWT backend in Java if you were willing to abandon the
(dubious) benefits of certain swing features.
Regards,
Christian.
This all has been discussed here a few times at least. But just to put
my thoughts concisely:
There are two big pieces missing in the SWT strategy:
A) An AWT Toolkit implementation using SWT. That way systems with SWT
native implementations can run AWT/Swing code with no problems for
mixing SWT and AWT/Swing components.
B) An SWT in pure Java. Whether that means AWT + Java2D (faster) or AWT
+ Swing (easier to implement and support) is not as important as
important as having at least one. This would also support seamless
mixing of SWT and AWT/Swing components (hopefully with the same API!).
Neither of these elements are terribly difficult in the scheme of
things, and will make it possible for SWT to be adopted in an
incremental fashion by the Java community. And without that capability,
SWT will remain a tiny part of Java, which would be a shame because the
SWT initiative is probably the last best hope for fixing what ails the
Java GUI picture.
Jim
