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SWT on JavaFX still worked on? [message #1738833] Mon, 25 July 2016 10:13 Go to next message
Arne Deutsch is currently offline Arne DeutschFriend
Messages: 12
Registered: July 2009
Junior Member
Hello,

SWT on JavaFX looks quite dead in the git repository. It looks like it is in prototype status and no one is working on it. Is it true? If so I would be interested in the reasons. Some blocker items in implementation? Scope grown much more then anticipiated? Lack of time/interest from developers?

Kind regards,
Arne

Re: SWT on JavaFX still worked on? [message #1738835 is a reply to message #1738833] Mon, 25 July 2016 10:21 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Thomas Schindl is currently offline Thomas SchindlFriend
Messages: 6651
Registered: July 2009
Senior Member
Well yes we stopped because (in order of importance):

a) we had enough to migrate our applications (eg. we don't have a
TreeColumn use case)

b) Nobody pays us for it hence we don't have any incentives

c) It's not going to be possible to have a 100% port without SWT
deprecating old API and creating higherlevel ones (eg Event-Loop
spinning)

If you want to work on it we naturally accept patches, you can even file
bug reports but we most likely won't fix them unless someone sponsors us
to do so.

Tom

On 25.07.16 12:13, Arne Deutsch wrote:
> Hello,
>
> SWT on JavaFX looks quite dead in the git repository. It looks like it
> is in prototype status and no one is working on it. Is it true? If so I
> would be interested in the reasons. Some blocker items in
> implementation? Scope grown much more then anticipiated? Lack of
> time/interest from developers?
>
> Kind regards,
> Arne
>
>
Re: SWT on JavaFX still worked on? [message #1738836 is a reply to message #1738835] Mon, 25 July 2016 10:25 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Thomas Schindl is currently offline Thomas SchindlFriend
Messages: 6651
Registered: July 2009
Senior Member
Oh and just to say.

There was a lot of interest (might still be as SWT starts to suck more
and more) but everyone expected to get free lunch and that's what
BestSolution (the company I work for) decided to not provide.

Tom

On 25.07.16 12:21, Tom Schindl wrote:
> Well yes we stopped because (in order of importance):
>
> a) we had enough to migrate our applications (eg. we don't have a
> TreeColumn use case)
>
> b) Nobody pays us for it hence we don't have any incentives
>
> c) It's not going to be possible to have a 100% port without SWT
> deprecating old API and creating higherlevel ones (eg Event-Loop
> spinning)
>
> If you want to work on it we naturally accept patches, you can even file
> bug reports but we most likely won't fix them unless someone sponsors us
> to do so.
>
> Tom
>
> On 25.07.16 12:13, Arne Deutsch wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> SWT on JavaFX looks quite dead in the git repository. It looks like it
>> is in prototype status and no one is working on it. Is it true? If so I
>> would be interested in the reasons. Some blocker items in
>> implementation? Scope grown much more then anticipiated? Lack of
>> time/interest from developers?
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Arne
>>
>>
>
Re: SWT on JavaFX still worked on? [message #1738849 is a reply to message #1738836] Mon, 25 July 2016 12:39 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Arne Deutsch is currently offline Arne DeutschFriend
Messages: 12
Registered: July 2009
Junior Member
Hello Tom,

thank you for the quick answer. More or less what I expected ... main reason is missing business behind development. My personal feeling is like yours, that SWT is getting more and more leagacy. In fact I think that today it is a major drawback for the Eclipse IDE to be build on top of SWT. There are so many window managers (different linux distributions) with different UI schemes and stuff that it seems to be impossible to support them all well. I can see many linux machines today where eclipse works well only after a lot of fiddling. A bridge to JavaFX looks like a long term solution for these problems. I wonder if the eclipse foundation itself hasn't an interest to sponsor this development. Do you know if this is internally considered as a problem? Or are most people just happy with the current status?

Kind regards,
Arne
Re: SWT on JavaFX still worked on? [message #1739174 is a reply to message #1738835] Thu, 28 July 2016 06:07 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Erdal Karaca is currently offline Erdal KaracaFriend
Messages: 854
Registered: July 2009
Senior Member
Hi Tom,
Sorry, as maybe off-topic:
With event-loop spinning you mean what is known in SWT as the following?

while(Display.readAndDispatch());


Do you know of an alternative way to force the UI thread to dispatch events?

Thanks.

Thomas Schindl wrote on Mon, 25 July 2016 12:21
Well yes we stopped because (in order of importance):

a) we had enough to migrate our applications (eg. we don't have a
TreeColumn use case)

b) Nobody pays us for it hence we don't have any incentives

c) It's not going to be possible to have a 100% port without SWT
deprecating old API and creating higherlevel ones (eg Event-Loop
spinning)

If you want to work on it we naturally accept patches, you can even file
bug reports but we most likely won't fix them unless someone sponsors us
to do so.

Tom

On 25.07.16 12:13, Arne Deutsch wrote:
> Hello,
>
> SWT on JavaFX looks quite dead in the git repository. It looks like it
> is in prototype status and no one is working on it. Is it true? If so I
> would be interested in the reasons. Some blocker items in
> implementation? Scope grown much more then anticipiated? Lack of
> time/interest from developers?
>
> Kind regards,
> Arne
>
>

Re: SWT on JavaFX still worked on? [message #1739244 is a reply to message #1739174] Thu, 28 July 2016 19:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Thomas Schindl is currently offline Thomas SchindlFriend
Messages: 6651
Registered: July 2009
Senior Member
You mean SWT? The problem is not the spinning which is essential when
you use blocking. The problem is more that SWT exposes this very
low-level API instead of something more higherlevel.

The other question is: Is it really a good idea to use the blocking
paradigm in 2016? You could work with Callbacks (see Web-Technologies),
Reactive-Streams, Futures instead.

Tom
Re: SWT on JavaFX still worked on? [message #1739250 is a reply to message #1739244] Thu, 28 July 2016 22:30 Go to previous message
Colin Sharples is currently offline Colin SharplesFriend
Messages: 96
Registered: July 2009
Location: Wellington, New Zealand
Member

One SWT feature I would quite like is BusyIndicator. My app is client-server, so I have quite a few situations where a user action is going to take a couple of seconds, long enough that I want to provide feedback to the user that something is happening, but not long enough that you really want to go asynchronous with a background task and a callback. Think of check-out/check-in operations in a version control system. The SWT BusyIndicator is very useful for this scenario, just updating the cursor until the Runnable finishes. I came up with the following as a JavaFX equivalent, but it doesn't seem to be all that reliable - quite often the wait cursor doesn't show at all, or only briefly at the end. I'm not sure if this is just a limitation of JavaFX or if there is a better way to do it.

  public static void showWhile(Scene scene, Runnable runnable) {
    Cursor cache = scene.getCursor();
    scene.setCursor(Cursor.WAIT);
    Task<Void> task = new Task<Void>() {
      @Override
      protected Void call() throws Exception {
        try {
          Platform.runLater(runnable);
        } finally {
          Platform.runLater(() -> scene.setCursor(cache != null ? cache : Cursor.DEFAULT));
        }
        return null;
      }
    };
    new Thread(task).start();
  }


Colin Sharples
CTG Games Ltd
Wellington, New Zealand
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