Stefano Mazzocchi wrote, On 29/06/2003 19.09:
on 6/28/03 4:43 PM Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
The fact is that SWT is crap. Total crap.
This is a bit too much taken out of context I reckon ;-)
It was made to try and show that saying that something is crap or not, things don't go far.
Pff, SWT is a thin layer on top of the operating system, everything else is native, therefore optimized and normally hardware accelerated (today's GPUs are gigaflop machines with gigabyte/sec video mem2mem transfer rates).
You think you can be faster with Swing (even in natively hardware accelerated ones, as in mach-o). As one that tried to outsmart 3D hardware accelerated cards with pure x86 assembly programming, I can tell you that you are simply wrong.
I don't really think that SWT is crap. As it was concieved, implementation-wise it's very cleverly done. But it has other disadvantages, that are not to be forgotten.
Saying that SWT cool, and Swing is crap is not going to bring anywhere. Swing is much better a toolkit, and in many use cases is not slow.
SWT is another nice toolkit, that BTW on my machine doesn't seem to be so snappy as you say.
Hopefully, this eclipse will outshade sun's views and java speed on the client will *finally* emerge from the casted shadows.
The problem is not swing's speed, it has never been really.
Bugs. Tons of them. I still have to see the text widget be at least usable, with correct font properties and alignment. Only now with 1.4.2 we have a decent file-selector that does not wait minutes on directories to load.
A decent-looking UI. The look&feels are bad, and they are getting a bit better now. Have you ever looked at the alloy L&F? I use DBVisualizer that now uses it, and the feeling is much better than Eclipse.
Also Looks is quite interesting, and well polished.
Threading. A system that can make the system snappy while not having to mess with threading for trivial things.
I have used Swing quite a lot, and as you know I even gave a shot at making a WYSIWYG editor for XML. I had to debug the Editor.
From this experience, AFAIK, Swing's problems are not speed.
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Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- verba volant, scripta manent -
(discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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