There is a huge gulf between native widgets and HTML5, in terms of both capability and resource usage. Because there's a tradeoff, there are good reasons to pick one or the other depending on your situation.
In 2013, Electron had the novel idea "let's take the latest available Chromium and tie it to an in-process VM as deeply as we can". Electron now had much deeper browser integration than SWT could achieve, because SWT takes the "lowest-common-denominator" approach. I was skeptical when it came out, but boy was I wrong. People have used it to build a ton of really cool stuff:
http://electron.atom.io/apps/
But native widgets still have a place! The
libui project is essentially an immature version of SWT written in C. And even though it's less than a year old, it has caught on like wildfire and become a popular widget kit in many languages already. People want SWT, but all their pull requests are going to libui because it's hard to embed SWT (through no fault of SWT's).
Right now, users have to pick "do I want native widgets?" or "do I want latest and greatest HTML5?". I think it would be awesome if SWT allowed users to have the best of both worlds.
With all the discussion of the CSS theming engine on ide-dev, I'm worried that resources are going to be spent on further theming efforts. I hope we give up on trying to make SWT into HTML5, and instead try to make SWT and HTML5 live together as best we can.
Ned Twigg
Lead Software Architect, DiffPlug LLC
540-336-8043
340 S Lemon Ave #3433, Walnut, CA 91789
