R
richnjones
Well thanks for the replies. I am still unsure. I was swaying towards
Swing but learning a new technology is tempting. The Eclipse RCP look
like it might be worth a look...
Well thanks for the replies. I am still unsure. I was swaying towards
Swing but learning a new technology is tempting. The Eclipse RCP look
like it might be worth a look...
L
Lew
J
Joe Attardi
This is not what makes Swing applications crappy, IMHO. It's when aRamon said:
Swing programmer does not properly work with the event dispatching
thread, running long-running tasks on it. This causes the GUI to feel
slow and unresponsive.
I started learning SWT a while back - still have a book on it - and I
just didn't find the same level of flexibility that Swing offers.
A
Arne Vajhøj
Ramon said:
The term "inferior good" in economics means that demand
decreases when income increases - it does not say anything
about quality. The same term outside of economics usually
mean poor quality.
Arne
A
Arne Vajhøj
Roedy said:
Swing was released with Java 1.2 in 1998.
SWT was made open source by IBM in 2001. It must have
existed earlier, but I think that was when it became
available for people to use.
Arne
R
Ramon F Herrera
You are right in that the term is only marginally related to low
quality, but to the *perception* of low quality. Some textbook
examples are the Pentium that couldn't divide and the IBM Peanut with
its atrocious keyboard (or the Ford Edsel). IBM was involved in both
cases. Even after IBM was pressured by the press and customers into
giving a free replacement keyboard, the first IBM home offering was
dead, killed by its own progenitor. During the Pentium ordeal IBM had
already morphed into the great (or at least wiser) company that it is
today and offered to replace all the "broken" CPUs at its expense,
which left Intel no option but oblige.
The Swing designers and apologists are quick to blame its faults on
"bad programmers" but they never say that the Swing successes are
attributable to "good programmers" but to "good design on our part"
instead.
-Ramon
L
Lew
Which leaves the questions of how many users actually are turned off by Swing
widgets, and whether that's actually Swing's fault.
Evidence?
L
Lew
Ramon said:
Citations?
R
Ramon F Herrera
Just go a couple of postings back in this thread, Lew:
[Joe Attardi:]
"This is not what makes Swing applications crappy, IMHO. It's when a
Swing programmer does not properly work with the event dispatching
thread, running long-running tasks on it. This causes the GUI to feel
slow and unresponsive."
I hope you are not going to ask me for citations about Java success
being the inescapable result of "good design". Those citations are
left as an exercise.
-Ramon
ps: You may replace "Java" for "Swing" above.
R
Ramon F Herrera
Lew:
Let's make some narrowing assumptions, as I have nothing to say about
threads and techie things of that nature. My issue is the user
experience, more specifically (and unfortunately because it is a fact
of life in more than 90% of Java desktop usage) on Windows.
Many of you out there jump to the defense of Java (or parts of it,
such as Swing) from the vantage point of never having the misfortune
of having to use Windows. I wish I could have that degree of freedom.
The bone I have to pick is Swing's emulated nature vs. SWT's use of
"The Real Thing (*)" as illustrated here:
http://www.eclipse.org/swt
Further narrowing: I have nothing to say about most of the widgets
which look and feel the same under Swing or under SWT. The best
possible discriminating widget is the File Chooser. In SWT we have
always been able to get an FC dialog and create new folders, list the
directory's contents from many views, etc. SWT designers left that
functionality where it belongs, in Redmond, WA, I am resigned to
accept. The "Open File..." in Eclipse has always behaved as it should
and it is as fast and responsive as it can possibly be.
Compare with NetBeans's "Open File...". In NB 5.5 you could create a
folder AS LONG as its name was "New Folder". The NB JFileChooser is
custom-made, and I have never seen it anywhere else. This is a cause
of *confusion* leading to the *perception* of Java being on the
fringes, an "inferior product" like the IBM peanut or the Pentium that
couldn't divide.
I have a folder with several hundred MP3 songs, and it takes the
Windows *native* shell a long while to list (and re-list by header
clicking) all the song titles, durations, etc. I would never be so
cruel as to assign the job of listing those songs to Swing. Eclipse
and SWT perform such job to my complete satisfaction.
-Ramon
(*) (TM) Coca-Cola, with apologies.
L
Lew
Ramon said:
Just go a couple of postings back in this thread, Lew:
[Joe Attardi:]
"This is not what makes Swing applications crappy, IMHO. It's when a
Swing programmer does not properly work with the event dispatching
thread, running long-running tasks on it. This causes the GUI to feel
slow and unresponsive."
I hope you are not going to ask me for citations about Java success
being the inescapable result of "good design". Those citations are
left as an exercise.
-Ramon
ps: You may replace "Java" for "Swing" above.
You cite someone pointing out that crappy programming makes Swing programs
bad, sure. But you haven't shown that Joe Attardi is either a Swing designer
or a Swing apologist. (Let alone substituting "Java" for "Swing" above.) You
failed to show that his comment isn't justified. You failed to show that he
was "quick to blame its faults", both by not showing that it was Swing's
faults that he was addressing, and that he was being "quick" instead of
deliberating long and carefully. You also failed to show that this is a
general pattern, instead citing only one person who is neither designer, nor
apologist, nor incorrect in his assessment, nor quick to reach his
conclusions. Your claim was general: that the designers (plural) and
apologists (plural) do this behavior. Where is your evidence?
Oh, you don't have any.
Yes, I am going to ask you for citations about Java success being the
inescapable result of "good design". You made an outrageous claim, and you
leave it up to *us* "as an exercise"? Come on!
You need to back up your own assertions with your own evidence. I assert that
you won't find it.
Now put up or shut up.
L
Lew
Ramon said:
I use Java in Windows all the time. I'm sure "many of us out here" also do -
it is the single largest-selling OS, hm? My experience isn't yours.
But that's beside the point. You made a claim about "many users" and backed
it up with your own personal experience and judgments. Where's your evidence
about "many" users?
J
John W. Kennedy
Ramon said:
....which happens to be the direct technological ancestor of every
keyboard made today...
R
Ramon F Herrera
John:
I am sure we are talking about two different artifacts. Circa 1981 IBM
had a keyboard research facility in Zürich. At the time, the only
devices which had keyboards were something really ancient. I bet
several readers have heard of them, they were known as "typewriters",
more specifically the "IBM Selectra". I hope I don't have to tell the
story of the original IBM PC (Model 5150), it was based on the Intel
8088 chip and it came with a great, metallic, heavy keyboard. That was
an *office* computer. The masses clamored for a home computer and IBM
feared (they had no idea how accurate their worst nightmares were)
that a decent home computer with a good KB would eat into their
profits. Hence the IBM PC jr aka "peanut" was born. It had a plastic-
but-decent, Zürich designed, *optional* keyboard, and one standard
that was aptly named "the Cliclet keyboard" by those nasty magazine
writers (I was proud to have the PC World first issue, it was stapled,
several months later it was the thickest magazine ever put together by
an US press).
Allow me to place the keyboard in question in the ancestry,
evolutionary terms that you introduced...
Let's just say that the Chiclet KB was a wrong turn in the
genealogical KB tree, and as expected, didn't leave any descendants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiclet_keyboard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
-Ramon
R
Ramon F Herrera
I hope you are not going to ask me for citations about Java success
being the inescapable result of "good design". Those citations are
left as an exercise.
ps: You may replace "Java" for "Swing" above.
You cite someone pointing out that crappy programming makes Swing programs
bad, sure. But you haven't shown that Joe Attardi is either a Swing designer
or a Swing apologist. (Let alone substituting "Java" for "Swing" above.) You
failed to show that his comment isn't justified. You failed to show that he
was "quick to blame its faults", both by not showing that it was Swing's
faults that he was addressing, and that he was being "quick" instead of
deliberating long and carefully. You also failed to show that this is a
general pattern, instead citing only one person who is neither designer, nor
apologist, nor incorrect in his assessment, nor quick to reach his
conclusions. Your claim was general: that the designers (plural) and
apologists (plural) do this behavior. Where is your evidence?
Oh, you don't have any.
Yes, I am going to ask you for citations about Java success being the
inescapable result of "good design". You made an outrageous claim, and you
leave it up to *us* "as an exercise"? Come on!
You need to back up your own assertions with your own evidence. I assert that
you won't find it.
I'll take the second option.
-RFH
M
Martin Gregorie
Sorry, but that's incorrect.Ramon said:
I remember using a "glass teletype" terminal in 1972 on an ICL 1902S: it
was a direct replacement for a KSR-33 teletype and was smaller, faster
and silent. By the mid 70s all mainframes and minicomputers used
terminals with electronic keyboards and cursor addressing on the
display. Independent sources of generic terminals were well established
by 1980. Manufacturers included Televideo, Wyse and DEC. Remember the
VT-100? These were in use on a lot of microcomputers such as SWTPc,
NorthStar and Imsai by 1978. The Apple II and Commodore PET had
electronic keyboards built in.
The only thing that IBM introduced was a keyboard design that reported
key up/down and the "scan code" (i.e. key co-ordinate) to the computer
for translation into ASCII. This translation and shift key handling
stole CPU cycles but did allow the keyboard to generate EBCDIC as well
as ASCII and/or handle non-English by simply swapping the key tops.
All the earlier keyboards did the ASCII conversion and shift key
handling etc internally in hardware before outputting ASCII codes. The
cheaper ones output characters in parallel on a ribbon cable: more
expensive detached keyboards used a UART to output a serial character
complete with parity and stop bits.
I think they were more worried that it would displace their current
small business computers. Using an 8088 with a low clock speed stopped
the PC from being obviously faster and cheaper than their other small
computers. By the time the PC-AT appeared (8086 at 8 MHz) the Baby/36
program (a System/36 software emulation) could run S/36 software faster
than any model in that range. I knew people who used Baby/36 as their
program development system because it was cheaper, faster and more
convenient than using a real S/36.
In the UK you almost never saw an IBM PC used at home: people were
buying PC clones instead due to the price difference. IBM kit started
appearing at home only when used PCs came on the market as companies
upgraded.
M
Martin Gregorie
Does this mean that SWT only works in a Windows environment?Ramon said:
A
Arne Vajhøj
Ramon said:
????
Ever heard about VT52 and VT100 ?
They had a keyboard. And I would not call them typewriters.
Arne
C
Christian
Martin said:
no SWT is just limited to a few diffrent OS/UI-managers..
M
Martin Gregorie
Christian said:
Any idea which ones?
IOW, is it really worth using?