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From the IDE perspective, we have "almost" everything we need to do a decently styling
As an Eclipse IDE user and RCP developer, I disagree. I preferred the style of Eclipse 3.x for both use cases. In the situation that I need to build something that doesn't look like a native app, then I wouldn't use a native widget toolkit - I would use JavaFX or HTML5.
The CSS theming adventure is now a 6+ year project, and it can "almost" do "decent" styling. The electron project was able to do great styling immediately, and as a result it was adopted very quickly! I recognize resources are limited.
But if we declared bankruptcy on SWT theming, and used those resources for SWT-Chromium, how far could we get?
Building a CSS theming engine for native widgets was a great experiment. But somebody built electron in less than a year, and it turns out to be more useful than what we've been building for 6+ years. At what point do we say "Hey! That was a better idea!" and follow their lead?
I recognize the theming engine has users, and mine is just one opinion of many. But here's my long and short: I built an Eclipse RCP application. Today, there are new entrants in my market that use Electron. They have access to capabilities that I don't. I told my customers my app was stable and lightweight on resources, but the CSS engine is slowing it down and linux compatibility has been tough (GTK's fault more than SWT, but my customers don't care). I'm no core Eclipse committer, but I do make some contributions (
RxJava and SWT,
Gradle and Eclipse RCP). I don't have the capacity or budget to write SWT-Chromium, and I see no will in the broader community to do so either. So I have to decide - do I abandon my investment and jump ship? Or stick it out and try to turn the boat?
Since I'm just a one man company, my survival in the market is more to do with "surfing" - riding a good wave, vs "mountain climbing" - climbing from the bottom. I'm still sticking it out, but the great thing about being home to "surfers" is that they bring contributions and bug reports. It kills me to see SWT become bloated with theming hooks while surfers flock to "libui" and electron. It seems that so much of Eclipse's resources go into this dead-end theming engine, I wonder what could be if we refocused.
