[platform-swt-dev] Fw: Providing SWT themeable scrollbars(onWindows)

["Arun K Thondapu" <arunkumar.thondapu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Re-sending my response as my original email has somehow not appeared on the list... apologies if you receive duplicates.

----- Forwarded by Arun K Thondapu/India/IBM on 24-02-16 08:19 PM -----

From: Arun K Thondapu/India/IBM
To: "Eclipse Platform SWT component developers list." <platform-swt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 24-02-16 06:25 PM
Subject: Re: [platform-swt-dev] Providing SWT themeable scrollbars (onWindows)

---

Hi Fabio,

Sorry for chiming in a bit late on this but from my perspective as well, it would be difficult to accept patches which follow the original approach suggested by you.

I endorse and agree with all the concerns raised by McQ, Alex Kurtakov, Christian etc. in terms of the necessity to have an implementation that covers at least 2 of the main windowing systems supported by SWT (preferably all 3) and also in terms of the implementation being entirely equivalent to the natively supported behavior (nearly or almost same may not be acceptable) except for the theming part alone. As already explained by Alex, this scenario is very different from the GTK3 support one. In addition, in the case of GTK3, it was more or less an extension of SWT's original philosophy of being a thin wrapper around the OS native widgets which needed a migration from GTK2 to GTK3.

To try and summarize the discussion so far, the approach suggested may not be a feasible one in its current shape because it goes against these tenets that we don't want to compromise with for the sake of making other improvements (which I totally concede are necessary) :

1. SWT is designed (and will continue) to use the stuff from the corresponding OS, e.g. widgets, default colors, fonts etc.
2. SWT API is supposed to work on all supported platforms with only very few exceptions / deviations

That said, we really appreciate the thoughts and ideas regarding taking SWT forward and the above points shouldn't be mistaken to be in support of keeping things at status quo.
Its definitely worth exploring more to figure out whether Windows could somehow support CSS based styling of widgets like the way GTK3 does now. This would help make the SWT part of the implementation cleaner, less error-prone and easier to maintain.

Regardless of how we go about achieving this functionality in Eclipse/SWT, IMHO it might be a good idea to capture the approaches and discussions on a bugzilla item for better tracking.

Thanks,
Arun

Fabio Zadrozny ---24-02-2016 01:24:50 AM---On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:22 PM, Christian Campo <christian.campo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From:        Fabio Zadrozny <fabiofz@xxxxxxxxx>
To:        "Eclipse Platform SWT component developers list." <platform-swt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:        24-02-16 01:24 AM
Subject:        Re: [platform-swt-dev] Providing SWT themeable scrollbars        (onWindows)
Sent by:        platform-swt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

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On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 4:22 PM, Christian Campo <christian.campo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From the outside watching this thread I believe most people send warnings or saw a lot of problems in your approach. At least one liked the approach to make styled scrollbars happen but didnt really endorse your approach.

I personally dont think a vote is necessary.

I would recommend to you to find an approach that does not require to change the SWT code base but rather can be added on top (like Nebula is added on top of SWT).

Adding an API that is only implemented on one platform is a non-starter. (in my experience)

And my experience comes from a number of SWT bug reports from some years ago (that are still open) that just wanted classes to be no longer „final“ which was refused and from creating a SWT/Qt port that didnt get much love in the SWT community for a number of reasons that I can understand actually.

SWT very much endorses the idea of having the same API and the same behaviour on all supported platforms. 98 % is in all cases known to me not good enough. (achieving that requires a maximum effort but has a number of advantages….)

but that is ust my 2 cents and you can of course do a vote anyway…… I really like the fact that you are trying to move SWT forward…..
christian

​Hi Christian,

Thanks for the feedback... I really think that in the end I may have to hack some other codebase and not SWT, even though I think SWT is the right place for it to be... for instance, the tree on windows is only usable because I did changes on the platform ui to add a painter which removed the native decoration and drew a non-native decoration with the expanded state over it... it clearly should've been done in SWT, which has an unusable tree with a dark background, so, this time around I tried to do what I think is the right thing first (especially because doing it from the outside requires much more hacking), but I'm prepared to do it from the outside too (in the end, users won't notice the difference anyways).

Best Regards,

Fabio
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