Re: [platform-swt-dev] SWT on top of swing?

[Christopher Deckers <chrriis@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Michael,
> From your experience:
> Do you think this is a possible way to go?
> Are there difficulties that are hard to overcome?
> Is the performance loss dramatic (speed and memory)?
For now I only tried with some samples and a basic application. It lacks a lot of optimization, but I have some conclusions.
Let's start with the bad points:
- You really feel the startup of the Swing implementation.
- Memory footprint is bigger.
- Some things cannot be coded (or I haven't found a way yet) like getting the absolute mouse location.

Nice things:
- Once the slow startup has completed, things go much better.
- Look and feel support (just by setting a system property)
- I will provide a component to contain AWT containers, so that people can mix both implementations.

I think it is a good port to have so that if an OS is not supported this one could be used. Also it will allow to use Swing components in an SWT application explicitely (as a "native feature" of the Swing port), which will allow the use of existing libraries that were not thought for SWT.

Now my problem is that I want to change job (want to change of country mainly) and the current project in my company is reaching some milestones. So not so much free time and thus I cannot really go forward on this port, though there are plenty of things to do: drag and drop flavors, some image handling (it is more like a hack for now), etc.

Now the big question: if it was fully working, would a lot of people be using it? I mean everyong is Windows or Linux mainly.
Anyway, I do that for fun so I don't care if I am the only one to use it :)

-Christopher