[news.eclipse.tools] Re: I disagree

[winghong@xxxxxxxxxx (Wing Hong Ho)]

I agree with Randy.

I do appreciate the fact that for very simple GUIs SWT is pretty good.  It
does have the native look-and-feel (which I think is extremely important
-- Swing just don't look right).

However, it is very difficult right now to implement feature-rich GUIs in
SWT.  For example, Swing tables have the concept of "cell renderers",
whereas in SWT all you will get is an icon and a label.  I came from Swing
and I miss a lot of the nice concepts and features in Swing widgets that
just aren't there in SWT.  I have also been struggling put multi-line text
in an SWT table.

Lastly, writing GUI code with a source editor is truly archaic.  I miss
the VCE in VA Java and I could have written some of the GUIs in there 10x
faster can I can using a source editor.

Randy Hudson wrote:

> Actually, you shouldn't be building you UI's with a source editor at all.
> You should be using a UI tool, like VA-Java's composition editor or
> JBuilder.  And in that case, there is no support for SWT at all.

> Read some of the above threads.  Developer can't even get tab traversal to
> work with SWT.  Layout support is about 10 times more powerful in AWT, but
> admittedly, I wouldn't touch GridBagLayout without VA-Java up my sleeve.