I much prefer Netbeans over Eclipse, as it uses the Swing libraries. The
Eclipse folk re-invented a whole User Interface library that does not
work as well in a cross platform manner. Their stated reason was that
they could not do what was needed with Swing, and clearly they believed
that it would never be possible (or else why spend so much money on it).
IntelliJ prooved them wrong over a couple of years ago. Netbeans is
prooving them to be dramatically wrong again.
Not really. SWT is about more than just writing an IDE.
SWT is therefore dead end
technology. An interesting idea, but a failed one.
Blatantly untrue FUD. Even if Swing does do everything SWT does, that in
no way means that SWT is dead, abandoned, or useless. It is an actively
developed project with many contributors and many applications.
Personally I'm more of a Swing person than an SWT person, but that
doesn't exist or isn't valuable. Competition is good. SWT has certainly
pushed Sun to improve Swing and Eclipse has pushed them to improve NetBeans.
