Tag Archives: SWT

Eclipse for SWT Development

Review/notes from May 1 meeting

On Tuesday, May 1, Carlus Henry from the Grand Rapids Java User Group, presented "Eclipse for SWT Development" at the Ann Arbor Java User Group.  He declared himself an Eclipse Enthusiast.  He drew a distinction between an evangelist and an enthusiast and declared that evangelists get paid for their admiration and enthusiasm!

In any case, he was definitely enthusiastic about both SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) and Eclipse.  Since I use Eclipse, but all of my GUI building has been in Swing, so I was really interested to hear more about SWT.

SWT is pretty famous for its ability to maintain the native look and feel, and performance, by harnessing the JNI (Java Native Interface).  I recently met Josh Marinacci, of the Swing team, and I've seen what really cool things can be developed with Swing, so I definitely think that Sun is not sitting on their hands in this regard.  Over at SwingLabs, there's some very cool stuff to look at, including the Nimbus Look and Feel. 

SWT is used for Eclipse plugins and RCP (Rich Client Platform, for which SWT is the widget toolkit).  Eclipse itself is written using RCP.  One disadvantage of SWT over Eclipse is in terms of Resource Management.  Native calls mean that managing resources become the programmer's responsibility, specifically.  The parent-child relationship (tree structure of widgets) does make this easy, but you have to know to manage it.

From Carlus' demo, I didn't feel that the layout was any less cumbersome in SWT than in Swing, just different, and so an additional learning curve is required on top of Swing layout management, if you already understand that.

I didn't leave the meeting hot to try SWT any time soon.  Honestly, with what I've seen Josh and SwingLabs doing, I'm really pleased with the new things that you can accomplish in Swing, and I'm looking forward to seeing the screencast from his "just 1 line of new code" at JavaOne this week.

It took me a while to get this review out, and in the meantime, IBM pulled its support for the Visual Editor in Eclipse (GUI builder for SWT applications).  I'm left wondering what that means, especially considering Matisse is such a full featured editor for Swing development (see *** Wall (of the Java Posse)'s article on using Matisse)

I really enjoy meeting Carlus.  He's an excellent speaker and I look forward to hearing him speak again sometime soon.  He's also heavily involved in the software community in Grand Rapids and he and I have promised to share resources to do what we can to promote software development, share JUG speakers, etc. in Michigan.  And I sure hope that Carlus sends an abstract for CodeMash 2008!

SWT

Eclipse

SWT Visual Editor: Dead?

Swing Labs

NetBeans 5.5

NetBeans Milestones downloads

Will it be SWT or Google Analytics on Tuesday? Or Both?

Tuesday, May 1 Ann Arbor Technical Meetings

It's the first week of the month, and so the Ann Arbor area is hopping with user group meetings.   I already mentioned the AACS meeting (Ruby on Rails), but there are also meetings on Eclipse for SWT Development and Google Analytics at the ITZone.  The Python User Group meeting, which would typically take place on Thursday May 3, is postponed until May 16, for a special event with Stephan Diehl (who will talk about stackless python and pypy).

So here are the meeting announcements for each of the Tuesday night talks.  I guess if you're resourceful, you could attend both, since the Google analytics talk goes until 7 and the Eclipse talk doesn't start until after the open networking at 7 (so probably 7:30)!

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At the AAJUG meeting, Carlus Henry speaks on:

Eclipse for SWT Development

Date: Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
Time: 7:00PM – 9:00PM EDT

Open Networking starts at 7 PM.

Meeting Location:
Washtenaw Community College, WCC BE158

 http://www.wccnet.org/search/roomlocator/index.php?room=BE158&bego=Go 

PRESENTATION:
===========

I. Introductions
    A. Who am I?
    B. Who are you?
II. Presentation Goals
III. What is SWT
    A. Setting up Eclipse for SWT Development
    B. SWT Demo
VI. What is JFace
    A. JFace Demo
VIII. Eclipse RCP
    A. Case Studies
    B. Demo

 
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At the ITZone, Jeff Gillis introduces and demos Google Analytics, a free web site analytics solution from Google used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Google Analytics also shows advertisers' data about their AdWords ROI so that they can purchase more appropriate keywords and track Ad Group performance.
Date: Tuesday, May 1, 2007.
Networking starts at 5.
Program 5:30-7.
Costs: Members are free, Nonmembers are $25, and students are $5.
Jeff Gillis – Associate Manager, Google Analytics
Jeff has been with Google for more than three years, working on AdWords operations, and since Google acquired and renamed Urchin, with the Google Analytics team. He focuses on marketing and operations for the service, and is a regular contributor to the official Google Analytics blog (http:// analytics.blogspot.com ). Before joining Google, Jeff was a technical solutions specialist for ParentWatch.com in New York City. He graduated with a BA in Literature from Stanford University.