Hype & Facts???: Swing vs. SWT

Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 02:20:52 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.gui
Size: 1,618 bytes

The IBM Eclipse SWT (their new native GUI library) seems to be making a
minor ruckus.
I'd like your thoughts on this part of the conversation found at sun (hence
biased). Does anyone know of anything more concrete or unbiased?
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/community/chat/JavaLive/2003/jl0121.html
<quotage>
Alan: I understand that IBM's Eclipse IDE has a library that takes better
advantage of the native interface. Do you think that Swing will be
"eclipsed" (please forgive me!) by this, and perhaps other alternative
libraries which offer a more responsive GUI interface (I imagine that such
libraries could be readily adapted to each individual platform)?
Scott Violet: I have no reason to believe Swing will be eclipsed by SWT.
There are many key differences between the two component libraries: (1) SWT
offers nowhere near the extensibility of Swing. (2) SWT requires you to
manage resources, including colors and fonts! (3) SWT is not as portable as
Swing, and oftentimes the limitations of the underlying toolkit will show
through, even for simple things like defaults. (4) SWT currently does not
scale as well as Swing: a table with 10,000 cells in SWT can take a minute
to create on some systems! Often people compare Eclipse and Forte and assume
this is a fair comparison of Swing and SWT. A far better comparison is
between Eclipse and JBuilder (or IDEA from IntelliJ). Comparing these two
builders shows nearly identical performance. Again, we are not standing
still in regards to performance. Early numbers for 1.4.2 show upwards of a
15% startup improvements for real apps!
</quotage>