Greetings,
On 1/12/06, George Ugarte <email@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
> I just need an opinion on what would be better to use - Swing or SWT
> on OS X? Or maybe I should ask - what do you guys use to build your
> GUI on OS X? Thank you.
It's vaguely akin to asking, 'What editor do you build your
application in?' There are, I believe, some strong feelings each way.
I'm a very hardcore believer in minimalism; don't ship libraries that
you don't need to, so I can't justify including SWT, triply-so because
it's so native-dependent, which translates to 'brittle' to me. I've
never been so impressed with SWT that it's gotten above my reflexive
'No extraneous packages' filter. Eclipse isn't a great showcase for
it, unfortunately, as it runs dog-slow on my 1Ghz 1Gb Powerbook.
That said, if your only target is OS X, the app packaging makes
including extraneous libraries worlds easier, because you have those
resource directories, etc., to put the libraries in. (I'm on the
verge of seriously considering Quaqua for that reason, it has
impressed me, and it appears to be a 'drop-in', which is nice...)
If .jar is one of your distribution mechanisms, SWT appears to be a
real PITA to include.
The whole AWT/SWT conflict thing makes my teeth ache, too, because it
seems to mean you can't fall back on Swing/AWT for things that SWT
doesn't do the way you want it to.
That said, there are people who swear by SWT, including apparently
Azureus, which has a very shiny UI, I have to admit.
I'll still stick with Swing; I can feel confident it's already on the
users box so that I don't need to ship it, it works very well, and
with a bit of care it's as responsive a UI as any other.
-- Morgan Schweers
p.s. If you want to do drag-and-drop UI development, you're hosed no
matter what, you'll need to include extra libraries because nobody
seems to build drag-and-drop UI builders atop Swing (mainly because
the standard layout managers are so sketchy).
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