Home → 2003/12/13, 14h02
Yet another SWT vs Swing opinion
The debate about what is best between Swing and SWT is endless. I read many weblog posts, online magazine articles, forum posts. The debate is generally focusing on engineering issues: Extensibility, scalability, performance, architecture, developer resources, Java-purity.
I did not see much comparisons from a user perspective. So here is one opinion from a user of Eclipse, the IDE built with SWT.
Jimmy likes developing with Eclipse. Eclipse helps Jimmy doing his job the way an IDE is expected to help him do it. But Jimmy likes Eclipse better than other Java IDEs that do the job as well. Jimmy feels Eclipse is an application that looks and feels as good as all his other Windows XP applications.
In short, Jimmy thinks that Eclipse is the best desktop Java application he has ever worked with. And Jimmy has used many many Java apps.
Switching to developer mode, I must now weight Jimmy's opinion compared to the engineering perspective. Is Jimmy's opinion heavy? I so much think so.
Comments (4)
Hi
Who is Jimmy man??? And have you ever seen JGoodies.com demos of what can be done with Swing? And to me Swing tables, lists, combo and boxes, and ... are more extensible than SWT thanks to cell editors/renderers... Even so, I like the SWT so much too and I wish it to become a standard part of the Java platform
On 2003/12/13 at 16h46, from Behrang Saeedzadeh
Hmm.. he is my non-technical side. This is a reference to an old Seinfeld episode where some guy always used his own name instead of "I".
This opinion is one I expressed here trying to forget about everything I know about Java. I spent many hours reading all the arguments about pros and cons of SWT versus Swing. I did this a year ago, and this morning again. I still cannot conclude from reading all there is.
So I called up on Jimmy ;) I asked him to show me his best Java app and he picked Eclipse. So I picked SWT for my app, which will anyway give me an opportunity to learn SWT.
On 2003/12/13 at 17h24, from Claude
From a completely non-advanced JAVA/Swing/SWT developer, but a long standing web developer...
SWT just looks better. And having worked for years in the real world, my clients choose our corporation because our product LOOKS GOOD! There are myriads of other software/developers out there whose product can do the same thing, and may be "purer" code, but functionality aside, they want to say, "Wow!". Aesthetics is an incredibly underrated development concern. For those of us who have decided to play with the big boys/girls, there is no room for archaic looking software solutions. It just doesn't sell to the masses.
On 2003/12/23 at 13h13, from David Thompson
This last comment sounds so much like a sales pitch. Seems like a twisted form of hypocrite marketing to me. Could be wrong though, sorry if I am David.
On 2003/12/30 at 22h18, from Claude