Well, not much blogging from me recently! I've been busy with a new project writing a lot of SWT code recently. SWT is the GUI toolkit behind Eclipse.
SWT is really great. It uses the native underlying toolkit on the system to draw widgets on the screen, rather than painting them on a canvas like Swing. Yes, it's more like AWT, but done much better IMO. On Linux, the underlying toolkit can be GTK2, Motif or QT, on Solaris/AIX/HP-UX it's Motif, Windows its MFC, etc.
The use of the native toolkit is so good that (at least under Linux) you can't tell that it's actually a Java application thats running under the hood, and in the case of Linux GTK (the toolkit used by Gnome), your application GUI uses anti-aliased Pango Fonts, track Gnome themes, and generally rock :)
Just before I started development I came across JellySWT, a SWT tag library for Jelly that lets you write GUI's using XML markup.
Really great stuff, as it allows you to develop and think of the GUI in a hierarchical and structured way (which I find much more natural too). Along with that, all of the other Jelly tag libraries are available as well which gives you great flexibility for writing dynamic code (there's also a JellySwing tag library for the Swing developers out there too).
Jelly seems to be really versitile and flexible software. Check it out :)
Posted by crafterm at November 11, 2003 12:19 PM | TrackBackWow, happy guy! JellySWT is something I'd love to try for months but always missed the time for.
Looks like it's really cool!
Posted by: Sylvain Wallez at November 12, 2003 06:39 PMHey mate,
you're sure about the swt/qt thing? I have never seen an port to qt. I've read though, that there is a port available inside ibm, but cannot be released due to the incompatibility of licenses?! Not sure what that means? gtk++ is gpl too, isn't it?
Cheers,
Mariano
Hi Mariano!
Sure, have a look http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-swt-home/dev.html and search for "linux/qt". They're still discussing releasing it to the Eclipse project, but it will be available in the next release of IBM's WebSphere Micro Environment.
Cheers,
Marcus
Posted by: Marcus Crafter at November 18, 2003 03:48 PMThat's actually for Qt/E, not for Qt proper... I wish IBM would hurry up and release a Qt implementation of SWT. Qt is that much faster than Gtk that it pains me to think they're dragging their feet when they could be getting improvements like that out to the world. >:-/
Posted by: a at December 21, 2003 06:27 AM