Even more to it -was there in the trenches with howitzer :-)

Post #88,780 by dmarker 3/17/03 6:27:43 AM Reply	Even more to it -was there in the trenches with howitzer :-) Microsofts widgets were dated & flawed & had many bugs in the Microsoft just wouldn't fix) - one very simple example, colored text on a button widget - (MS Sez you can have any color u like az long az it iz BLACK). Swing was a greatly updated & expanded widget set (to use the same phraseology) but many of the widgets were next to useless on anything but a local very high powered computer. The table widgest in swing were near fatal in their inability to expose data from very large lists. While at the time I fought vehmently against MS remarks that Swing was bloated (MS told so many lies at the time, that they had zilch credibility with me as a former MSDN member), I later concluded that MS was right - Swing only* worked for native apps & then it was still poor in some areas. IBM came to the same conclusion & tried to get Sun to be more flexile but failed & that in itself contributed to IBM abandoning Swing. At about this time my love affair with Sun ended & I concluded it was time to dump all their shares as I was satisfied they had screwed up badly. Sun still have some stuff on one of their web sites that I wrote for them re Java vs Active-X back when I thought the Sun really did shine & went to bat for them again & again. I wouldn't use Swing today. Prefer the IBM widget set & the WebSphere App Dev Env. Doug Marker (Once upong a great day the Sun shone brightly but then that day ended). Spectres from our past: Beware the future when your children & theirs come after you for what you may have been willing to condone today - dsm 2003 Motivational: For any activity, ask yourself if the person you most want to be would do it - dsm 2003
Post #89,366 by bluke 3/19/03 7:41:16 AM Reply	Re: Even more to it -was there in the trenches with howitzer What did you mean by this "I later concluded that MS was right - Swing only worked for native apps & then it was still poor in some areas." What is a native app in this context? I was with Swing from the start, I developed apps using Swing 1.0 in JDK 1.1.6 and up (using com.sun.swing packages). From the start it was dog slow an buggy. In theory Swing was a good idea, you would get the same set of widgets on every platform, working the same on all platforms. However, in practice, it didn't work, for 2 reasons: 1. Performance, performance, performance. The performance even today sucks 2. Native look and feel support, the Windows L&F has never quite emulated real Windows 100%. In fact, Sun has still not come out with a Windows XP L&F. My preference would have been a fixed AWT with MVC (e.g. every widget would have a model like with Swing etc.), those widgets not found on any given platform would be emulated. SWT is too simplistic in that respect.
Post #89,378 by johnu 3/19/03 9:02:44 AM Reply	Re: Even more to it -was there in the trenches with howitzer My preference would have been a fixed AWT with MVC (e.g. every widget would have a model like with Swing etc.), those widgets not found on any given platform would be emulated. SWT is too simplistic in that respect. Are you talking about plain SWT or are you including JFace? My understanding is that JFace is the MVC wrapper around SWT. We are moving to Java development and have done a first proof of concept module using Swing (which is integrated into our PowerBuilder app). It works ok, but I'm wondering if SWT is ready now to replace Swing. What's your opinion? Regards, John Urberg
Post #89,434 by bluke 3/19/03 12:05:04 PM Reply	This is what I understand I have used Swing extensively, I have only read about SWT and have not used it. JFace is a UI toolkit implemented using SWT that simplifies common UI programming tasks. JFace is window-system-independent in both its API and implementation, and is designed to work with SWT without hiding it. I don't think that JFace provides the same level of MVC suport that Swing does. [link\|http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/os-ecgui1/index.html?dwzone=java\|JFace tutorial]

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