Java 6 and Swing on Linux

[Dave Smith]

Michael Torrie wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 11:07 -0700, Bryan Sant wrote:
>   
>> I don't mind SWT's API or the architecture per se.  What I don't like
>> about it is, 1) it doesn't come with the JDK by default (so you get an
>> extra 3 - 4MB to download with your app), and SWT doesn't have a sweet
>> GUI builder like the one that exists for Swing in NetBeans.  Eclipse
>> has an SWT GUI builder plugin, but it is pretty sorry compared to
>> NetBeans.
>>     
>
> I have not programmed in Swing or SWT, but from what I've been told,
> Swing is a much nicer framework.  SWT is less abstracted, has a slightly
> different object model, and is more like the old AWT.  It also doesn't
> quite hide all the platform differences.  But I could be wrong, as I
> have no experience in this area.
>   

Having programmed in both Swing and SWT, I prefer the SWT API. Bare in 
mind, though, that the last version of Swing I used was Java 1.4, so 
this may not be fair, but the SWT creators got a lot of stuff just 
right, especially layout managers. I also find SWT less verbose since 
you add widgets to their parents directly in your constructor call, 
rather than creating the object, and calling an add() method. On an 
unimportant note, I prefer the term "Widget" over "Component" personally. :)

All that being said, in my experience, neither Swing nor SWT can hold a 
candle to Qt. Has anyone checked out Jambi?

--Dave