[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: Using SWT/JFace to build Fat-Client App

["David J. Orme" <daveo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hans Deragon wrote:
> Swing's API is much more flexible, richer and follows the MVC paradigm.  

This is definitely true.

> SWT is more basic and thus you must implement more supporting classes.  

This is true for a wide class of applications.  If you have a large 
database-driven application, it's almost certainly true.

> JFace helps, but is not Swing.  Also, you are not allowed to subclass 
> SWT widgets, while you can subclass Swing widgets.  You have to do more 
> under SWT than you have to do under Swing.

True, if you need to subclass under SWT, the Decorator pattern is your 
only recourse.

> Because SWT lacks a few features, a started a little open source project 
> named SWT MVC Wrapper (http://swtmvcwrapper.sourceforge.net).  Its still 
> alpha though.

Nice work.  I wish you luck and hope you find other like-minded people 
to help your work along!

> Its sad that there is not a real, powerfull and fast GUI API for Java.  
> This is why Java never took off as a platform for GUI building...

That's what SWT and the Eclipse Application Framework are for.  At ASC, 
we haven't given up on this yet.  ;-)


Dave
--
Dave Orme
Advanced Systems Concepts
http://www.swtworkbench.com