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Home » Eclipse Projects » Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) » Future of SWT(Future of SWT as a toolkit and as main toolkit for Eclipse)
Future of SWT [message #1729359] Wed, 13 April 2016 11:06 Go to next message
Andy Junius is currently offline Andy JuniusFriend
Messages: 8
Registered: February 2014
Junior Member
Hi All,

Maybe a provocative question for this forum but I'll ask anyway: does anyone know what the plans for SWT are? Especially with respects to Eclipse, the only major project I'm aware of that uses SWT. From what I've got (e.g. through this interview here: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/eclipse-tom-schindl-javafx) there are plans to replace SWT with JavaFX for future Eclipse versions. In addition there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of interest in SWT, best visible in this forum where a large number of questions get viewed by thousands of people but no one answers them.

I did use Swing a lot in the past until Oracle announced they make JavaFX their main GUI technology. I did learn JavaFX and have been working for almost a year with it. I have to admit, this is a disappointing experience for a number of reasons - so I tried SWT for GUI development. It might have it shortcomings too, but I like it a lot more than both Swing and JavaFX. But really mastering it will take some time and this is the reason why I try to find out more about the future of this technology. What is your opinion? Is it worth the effort?

Cheers,
Andy
Re: Future of SWT [message #1729361 is a reply to message #1729359] Wed, 13 April 2016 11:38 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Thomas Schindl is currently offline Thomas SchindlFriend
Messages: 6651
Registered: July 2009
Senior Member
I only answer the part where you mention that *I* said that Eclipse will
replace SWT through JavaFX!

SWT will be the UI-Tookit for the Eclipse IDE and I clearly said that in:

---8<---
Do you think that part of the runtime is going to be contributed back
into platform or does it fit in to that layer?

Not really because we consume the core platform which is 90% of Eclipse,
what the Eclipse platform provides and only add those extra 10% as part
of our FX project, which is an Eclipse project so you get all the IP
stuff, everything is IP clean so you have the same standards that you
have with API contracts and all the stuff, so we really follow the
Eclipse process. So I don’t think that we would put that back to the
platform because as the main platform for the IDE is SWT, that’s
something that won’t change because so much UI has been written on top
of this SWT layer — that IDE will always stay at the level of SWT and so
it doesn’t make sense to go back with the renderers to the platform, to
keep them in the e(fx)clipse project.
---8<---

It's *my believe* that SWT is not suitable to meet todays UI
requirements but that is my personal opinion. JavaFX has it quirks but
it's architecture is much better suited for todays UI requirement than
SWT (will ever be).

Tom

On 13.04.16 13:07, Andy Junius wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Maybe a provocative question for this forum but I'll ask anyway: does
> anyone know what the plans for SWT are? Especially with respects to
> Eclipse, the only major project I'm aware of that uses SWT. From what
> I've got (e.g. through this interview here:
> http://www.infoq.com/interviews/eclipse-tom-schindl-javafx) there are
> plans to replace SWT with JavaFX for future Eclipse versions. In
> addition there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of interest in SWT, best
> visible in this forum where a large number of questions get viewed by
> thousands of people but no one answers them.
>
> I did use Swing a lot in the past until Oracle announced they make
> JavaFX their main GUI technology. I did learn JavaFX and have been
> working for almost a year with it. I have to admit, this is a
> disappointing experience for a number of reasons - so I tried SWT for
> GUI development. It might have it shortcomings too, but I like it a lot
> more than both Swing and JavaFX. But really mastering it will take some
> time and this is the reason why I try to find out more about the future
> of this technology. What is your opinion? Is it worth the effort?
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
Re: Future of SWT [message #1730306 is a reply to message #1729361] Sun, 24 April 2016 08:26 Go to previous message
Martin J is currently offline Martin JFriend
Messages: 50
Registered: August 2015
Member
I don't think JavaFX will be the future. Sun/Oracle never implemented Java GUI properly. That's why SWT came to existence. There are many SWT programs written in the past. They will become legacy systems for long time to come. There is no need for SWT to accommodate Tablet style interface. JavaFX is not going to be implemented on Android and IOS. There is no point going into JavaFX. JavaFX won't work as good as SWT.

I wrote huge system in AWT initially. Then converted into Swing. But Swing GUI was a disaster. So I rewrote using SWT. It was huge drain. If I rewrite again, I wouldn't use Java any more. I just hope SWT will work for long.
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