[news.eclipse.technology.albireo] Re: For Starters...

[Cklewis <chriskwonlewis@xxxxxxx>]

I just wanted to drop my thoughts and say I think this will be a great 
and very useful project. I'm glad there's always people out there trying 
to make things easier for the rest of us, in this case the SWT/Swing 
integration.

As far as what i'm doing with Swing/SWT integration, I'm basically 
adding more features to a program someone already made in swing. A vague 
description of the program is to basically visualize communications from 
previous simulations. The visualization is done using *piccolo. They 
want me to add other features to the program, and I felt more 
comfortable writing in SWT because I'm not a fan swing.

However, there is some support for piccolo in SWT, but it remains 
incomplete and I'm not sure if it will ever get finished. Since the 
program already has thorough code done for piccolo in swing, I'd rather 
just use the SWT/Swing bridge to display the piccolo swing stuff.

I've read your article Mr. Hirsch, but besides yours its been hard for 
me to find examples on Swing/SWT integration. In situations like this, 
diverse examples are very important and helpful for me.

I downloaded the examples, but none of them are runnable when I tried 
them. It would have been helpful to actually have code for a runnable 
program that embedded a swing component in it, even if it was a small 
snippet.

I have yet to code any of the integration part as I'm still trying to 
figure it out just based on your examples. My main worries as of right 
now are unexpected behavior and I'm worried about managing each thread 
as I don't really have experience doing this.

Hope my comments and thoughts were somewhat useful.

*piccolo: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/download/open-source.shtml

Gordon Hirsch wrote:
> First, a couple of pointers:
>
> Albireo proposal: http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/albireo/
> Wiki page: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Albireo_Project
>
> The wiki page has very little content today, but it will grow over time. 
> Add it to your watchlist if you are interested in this proposed project.
>
> The existing proposal lists a some specific features for Albireo, but 
> it's not meant to be exhaustive.
>
> We'd love to hear about what you are doing with Swing/SWT integration. 
> What are the problems you have faced? Were you able to solve them? If 
> so, how? In general, what would you like to see a project like Albireo 
> provide?
>
> In any case we'd like to know if you support this project, either here 
> or via e-mail. (Better still, how about participating? :-))
>
> This information will help us validate and improve the proposal, and 
> hopefully help make the project something that is useful to a wide 
> audience.