Re: Java Language Advocacy (was Re: How ASF membership works and what it means)
On Sat, 28 Jun 2003, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: Christopher Oliver wrote, On 28/06/2003 19.19: Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: ... I'm really confused about this SWT thing. On my computer Eclipse feels slower than JBuilder. And I still have to understand what makes SWT so compelling and AWT so dreaded. Check out JGoodies' fake eclipse LF using swing: http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/metamorphosis/index.html JGoodies is now open source on java.net. Yeah, I know, thanks anyway. The fact is that SWT is crap. Total crap. Ok, now what do we say? ;-) In reality, SWT is just a better AWT, that had been stopped because of consistency of user interfaces between systems and widget customization. If I want to make my widget in Swing it's sooo easy, and I get the same interface on all systems. I remember the bad days of AWT in this regard. No, Swing sucks because of how it's implemented underneath. If you look at the editor code, it's full of events going round like mad, and objects being created in abundance. For example, here is a system that uses OpenGL to make Swing faster. As you can see it's better, but not an order of magnitude as many think it may be: http://www.lri.fr/~fekete/agile2d/ Just because SWT *may* feel better on some systems doesn't mean that it's the answer. The single biggest difference between so-so and really great Swing apps is about the way developers handle threading issues. Swing is single threaded, and so we see apps that keep blocking. I programmed AWT/Swing applications a lot in the past. I agree with you that Swing programming is far more easier than SWT. But the thing of Swing that brothers me most is that Swing application doesn't match the lookfeel on other systems than Windows. In a Gnome/GTK environment Swing looks really ugly. Yes, I know JGoodies too, but I want that my applications adapts the lookfeel of the system. In this sense, Swing doesn't have a change. I know that Sun support GTK themes in the last JDK, but only an emulation of image themes not native ones. And that's only because Sun want to use Gnome 2.x for their workstations. _This_ is really crap. My 2 cents, Stephan.
Re: Java Language Advocacy (was Re: How ASF membership works and what it means)
snip 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. Which xml namespaces were you trying to do this for? xhtml, svg, mathml? I've tried numerous times to extend the javax.swing.text.*.* packages and had difficulties with replacing dtd's and applying schemas, etc. Is there any good open source endeavor in the area of editing XML? I like Bruno's pollo for the namespaces it is designed for. What I would like to see is a good client WYSIWYG editing system that works thru Cocoon services for multiple authors(with permissions and say corporate associations) from different parts of the world. Have it work the xml documents like CVS does source code. And please don't point out anything with zilla on the end. -Roger From this experience, AFAIK, Swing's problems are not speed. -- Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED] - verba volant, scripta manent - (discussions get forgotten, just code remains) -
Re: Java Language Advocacy (was Re: How ASF membership works and what it means)
Roger I Martin PhD wrote, On 30/06/2003 14.57: snip 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. Which xml namespaces were you trying to do this for? xhtml, svg, mathml? DocumentDTD, basically like xhtml I've tried numerous times to extend the javax.swing.text.*.* packages and had difficulties with replacing dtd's and applying schemas, etc. I rewrote all the underlying Document stuff to wrap XML DOM, and all the view mappings. It was really hard to debug. It works, but it's still buggy. Is there any good open source endeavor in the area of editing XML? I like Bruno's pollo for the namespaces it is designed for. What I would like to see is a good client WYSIWYG editing system that works thru Cocoon services for multiple authors(with permissions and say corporate associations) from different parts of the world. Have it work the xml documents like CVS does source code. And please don't point out anything with zilla on the end. Lenya http://cocoon.apache.org/lenya/ is a CMS that can work on it. And as for editing, OpenOffice 1.1 has xml filters, and can output in XHTML. My Java implementation is still around, if you have time, just ask me. -- Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED] - verba volant, scripta manent - (discussions get forgotten, just code remains) -
Re: Java Language Advocacy (was Re: How ASF membership works and what it means)
on 6/28/03 4:43 PM Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: The fact is that SWT is crap. Total crap. 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. Hopefully, this eclipse will outshade sun's views and java speed on the client will *finally* emerge from the casted shadows. -- Stefano.
Re: Java Language Advocacy (was Re: How ASF membership works and what it means)
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 lookfeels are bad, and they are getting a bit better now. Have you ever looked at the alloy LF? 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. -- Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED] - verba volant, scripta manent - (discussions get forgotten, just code remains) -
Re: Java Language Advocacy (was Re: How ASF membership works and what it means)
Christopher Oliver wrote, On 28/06/2003 19.19: Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: ... I'm really confused about this SWT thing. On my computer Eclipse feels slower than JBuilder. And I still have to understand what makes SWT so compelling and AWT so dreaded. Check out JGoodies' fake eclipse LF using swing: http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/metamorphosis/index.html JGoodies is now open source on java.net. Yeah, I know, thanks anyway. The fact is that SWT is crap. Total crap. Ok, now what do we say? ;-) In reality, SWT is just a better AWT, that had been stopped because of consistency of user interfaces between systems and widget customization. If I want to make my widget in Swing it's sooo easy, and I get the same interface on all systems. I remember the bad days of AWT in this regard. No, Swing sucks because of how it's implemented underneath. If you look at the editor code, it's full of events going round like mad, and objects being created in abundance. For example, here is a system that uses OpenGL to make Swing faster. As you can see it's better, but not an order of magnitude as many think it may be: http://www.lri.fr/~fekete/agile2d/ Just because SWT *may* feel better on some systems doesn't mean that it's the answer. The single biggest difference between so-so and really great Swing apps is about the way developers handle threading issues. Swing is single threaded, and so we see apps that keep blocking. -- Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED] - verba volant, scripta manent - (discussions get forgotten, just code remains) -
Re: Java Language Advocacy (was Re: How ASF membership works and what it means)
Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: on 6/26/03 12:01 PM Christopher Oliver wrote: Another aspect not always noticed is the speed of the compiler. Because Java compilers don't perform any compile-time optimizations, they are significantly faster than C++ compilers. This is very important when dealing with very large codebases. Of course, Python doesn't get compiled at all, and I've heard it argued that interpreted languages will be used exclusively in the future with very large code bases for that very reason. hmmm, compilation is a highly parallelizable task so I don't really buy this as a valid argument against compiled languages. Agreed, it is a valid argument against that particular compiler though. -- They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
