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Re: [platform-swt-dev] CSS theming vs Chromium embed

Hi Ned,

the Eclipse platform engine is part of the Platform UI project. SWT provides the API which we require and I certainly hope that SWT continues to add styling support. From the IDE perspective, we have "almost" everything we need to do a decently styling. 

Most notable is the missing background color support on Buttons and Table headers and more both we have already external contributions (still need to be reviewed and integrated).

Alex is working on a deeper CSS integration for GTK which also looks very promising. 

I think a deeper SWT and HTML5 integration is very much desired but I'm not aware of anyone working on this.

Best regards, Lars

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 10:47 PM, Ned Twigg <ned.twigg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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

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