[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: SWT port for Swing!

[alun@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Alun)]

Hi Christopher,

There's a project (SwinT) on sourceforge that was set up to do exactly the 
same thing. As far as I can tell it's never moved beyond the planning 
stage and hasn't released any documents. You could try contacting the
admin to see if they have any unreleased code you could take on.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/swint/

When I first read about this idea I thought it was crazy; the reason many
of us are using SWT is that we want to get away from Swing! Also, suffering
the look/feel/performance of Swing *and* the SWT API would be just too
much for most mere mortals :-) However, I hadn't considered your argument 
regarding the use of SWT on unsupported platforms, eg. pre-MacOSX. I now
think it makes some sense. Plus you'll learn *a lot* about SWT and Swing!

Have fun.

Cheers.

Alun


Christopher Deckers wrote:

> Hi,

> A week and a half ago I started to port SWT to Swing (let's call it
> SWTSwing). I just considered Swing to be the "native windowing system" of
> the virtual machine, and started coding.

> I don't know if anyone did that before, but I do not care as it is more for
> self-learning :)  If this is not yet done, then people could use my results
> when it will be mature enough.
> Anyway, I think it is a really good idea for a port so that SWT applications
> could use Swing without changing the code for the few non-supported
> platforms. Eventually developers could use some Swing specific code if they
> want (similar to OLE on Windows). Moreover, SWT programs would work right
> away whenever a new platform with new VM is out, while waiting for the real
> native port to be developed. There are of course many other possibilities
> brought by such a port...

> For now, I succeeded in the following:
> - Branching to the swing event queue to process it on demand.
> - Handling layouts and containement hierarchies.
> - Basic handling of Control, Composite, Buttons, Menus, Graphic Context,
> ProgressBar, Sash, Dialog.
> - Cursors (even for the non-defined types)

> This is at early stage, so don't expect too much... I am currently working
> on tab folders and will probably go for tables and trees right after that.

> I created a Web site for SWTSwing 2 days ago:
> http://chrriis.brainlex.com/swtswing/

> Could people let me know what they think about this port? I still thing that
> both Swing and SWT are great, so please don't start a war, that is not the
> purpose of this post! ;)

> Best Regards,
> -Christopher