Where can I download SWT? (SWT homepage)

[Ramon F Herrera]

(if you are a human being, please ignore this. It is meant for the
search engine crawlers, as I am sick and tired of trying to find this
in Eclipse's web page). My reaction was: "Gee, I guess they gave up
and now Swing is King".

Historic Tip: The first crawler was developed for Altavista, and its
name was "Scooter".

Altavista itself was developed by a Skunk works type of operation,
against management and company policy (it was also against company
policy to place Internet e-mail addresses in DEC employees business
cards as they were against TCP/IP in favor of DECnet). Speaking of
company policy, Microsoft ignored, and then attacked the Internet for
close to a decade. The first Windows 95 did come with TCP/IP. They
thought Netware was the future of worldwide networking.

I suggest a name for a crawler: Slowpoke.

Anywho... Here's my keywords, Mr. Scooter:

SWT

Standard Widget Toolkit

SWT Home Page

Eclipse


Download

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

-RFH

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

Historic Tip: The first crawler was developed for Altavista, and its
name was "Scooter".

Altavista itself was developed by a Skunk works type of operation,
against management and company policy (it was also against company
policy to place Internet e-mail addresses in DEC employees business
cards as they were against TCP/IP in favor of DECnet).

I forgot to add that when the time came to sell the company, Altavista
was worth more than the whole Digital Equipment Corporation, and the
engineers who created it (in the Unix/Ultrix division in R&D, that's
how they scaped the wrath of management) could have been fired for
writing software that ran on TCP/IP.

SWT homepage

SWT download, where?

Looking for Mr. Good SWT.

SWT, where are thou?

http://www.eclipse.org/swt

-RFH

 

[Joe Attardi]

(if you are a human being, please ignore this. It is meant for the
search engine crawlers, as I am sick and tired of trying to find this
in Eclipse's web page).

If only web browsers had a feature to save locations of pages you want
to revisit later. They could even call them "Bookmarks"!

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

If only web browsers had a feature to save locations of pages you want
to revisit later. They could even call them "Bookmarks"!

Then again, you may want to send a message to the people in charge of
SWT, and embarrass them for the world to see. Or, you may want to help
other people to find such unreachable and hidden page.

They should invent something, and call it... Let's see: Usenet!

-RFH

 

[Philipp]

Then again, you may want to send a message to the people in charge of
SWT, and embarrass them for the world to see. Or, you may want to help
other people to find such unreachable and hidden page.

They should invent something, and call it... Let's see: Usenet!

I dont know for you, but the search terms "eclipse swt" bring up exactly
your page as first hit in Google.

:-D

 

[Lew]

I dont know for you, but the search terms "eclipse swt" bring up exactly
your page as first hit in Google.

:-D

First hit on Yahoo Search, too, were I crazy enough to want to use Eclipse or SWT.

 

[Lew]

First hit on Yahoo Search, too, were I crazy enough to want to use
Eclipse or SWT.

Here's one article on the comparison. (First hit on Yahoo for "swing vs
swt".) It generally favors SWT and Eclipse, claims that SWT is better for
productivity, then concludes,

take this bit of advice: don't program against the grain in Eclipse.
Don't try to dismantle the framework and rebuild it to suit your tastes.
So the height of the dialog header is 30 pixels instead of 35 --
or the cancel button for background tasks is red instead of mauve the
boss wants -- or you want, as "Mr. Ed" did, an Outlook-like "cool-bar"
instead of a "toolbar" -- or you want the font on the preferences dialog
to be a size larger -- my advice is to forget about it. ....
Programming against the grain is so counterproductive in Eclipse and SWT
that if your end-user requires extensive tweaking of the user interface,
then I wholeheartedly recommend using Swing. It will certainly provide you
the desired flexibility --
only, expect to pay a heavy price in terms of productivity.

<http://www.ahmadsoft.org/articles/swingswt/swingswt.html>

I read this as, "If you want the wrong result in half the time, use SWT. If
you want the right result, take longer and use Swing."

 

[RedGrittyBrick]

First hit on Yahoo Search, too, were I crazy enough to want to use
Eclipse or SWT.

This could be interpreted as you saying that you'd have to be crazy to
use Eclipse. You don't usually post flame-bait so either I've
misunderstood, or you have found some serious problems in Eclipse.

If the latter, I'd be interested in a brief summary of your reasons (or
a link to a prior post or web-page).

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

Here's one article on the comparison. (First hit on Yahoo for "swing vs
swt".) It generally favors SWT and Eclipse, claims that SWT is better for
productivity, then concludes,


<http://www.ahmadsoft.org/articles/swingswt/swingswt.html>

I read this as, "If you want the wrong result in half the time, use SWT. If
you want the right result, take longer and use Swing."

What the (Java developer's) world need is a tool that automatically
converts apps from Swing to SWT, and vice versa. Probably not a
trivial pursuit, but it would have both toolkits compete on a level
ground. The following is very wise, taken from SWT wiki:

"Which one is better: a screwdriver or a hammer...?"

I am a highly visual person, and frankly, SWT looks beautiful:

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

SWT does not try to place a tinted, distorted glass over the Mona
Lisa, as Swing does.

The whole issue (I am talking strictly about the visual aesthetics)
reminds me of the comments when the Macintosh came out:

"How come the Mac programs seem to be designed by an arts major
while Win3.1 look designed by an engineering major?"

and, my all-time favorite:

"The Macintosh is to Windows (3.1) as a beautiful woman to a
transvestite".

In speed of response terms, the one and only widget in which you can
see a substantial difference is in the implementation of JFileChooser.
Swing's is dismal, awful while SWT is perfect, like the real thing
(see transvestite comment above) because it IS the real thing.

I tend to disregard the "productivity" arguments, as the learning
curve is minimal compared with years of daily use. Once you learn one
of the tools well (however long it takes) you will be productive using
it.

Having said that, I have never used SWT, I use Swing because of
inertia. I learned Java with Swing-only JBuilder and following the
Swing only Java Tutorial. I didn't even know that there was an
alternative to Swing at the time.

Some people say that one fundamental reason for Eclipse's immense
success is its use of SWT.

-Ramon

ps:

SWT home page - Standard Widget Tookit - SWT download - http://www.eclise.org/swt
Where is SWT? Where can I find SWT?

 

[Lew]

This could be interpreted as you saying that you'd have to be crazy to
use Eclipse. You don't usually post flame-bait so either I've
misunderstood, or you have found some serious problems in Eclipse.

If the latter, I'd be interested in a brief summary of your reasons (or
a link to a prior post or web-page).

Flame bait, but meant as humo(u)r, not a serious condemnation of Eclipse.

Sorry, but Editor Wars
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_wars>
have been around too long for me to take them seriously.

I've been a vocal critic of many of NetBeans's flaws in the past, but in the
end I use the tools that are available. Hey, I even use vi if emacs isn't around!

I only use NetBeans because emacs doesn't have a good Java debugger.

In all seriousness I really do find NetBeans significantly more
straightforward to deploy and use. Eclipse and its (grand)children have
always struck me as kludgy, top-heavy and obscure. NetBeans comes across to
me as clean, direct and minimally intrusive.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I forgot to add that when the time came to sell the company, Altavista
was worth more than the whole Digital Equipment Corporation, and the
engineers who created it (in the Unix/Ultrix division in R&D, that's
how they scaped the wrath of management) could have been fired for
writing software that ran on TCP/IP.

I think the story has been spiced up a bit.

AltaVista's crawler was not the first. Several crawler based search
engines existed before AltaVista (Lycos is probably the most wellknown
name).

And TCP/IP was completely mainstream within DEC in 1995.

Arne

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

I think the story has been spiced up a bit.

Note to self: you have got to stop following Einstein's advice (you
know: the one about the relative importance of imagination vs.
knowledge).

AltaVista's crawler was not the first. Several crawler based search
engines existed before AltaVista (Lycos is probably the most wellknown
name).

Thanks for keeping me honest.

And TCP/IP was completely mainstream within DEC in 1995.

True. My recollection goes back to the 90-93 period.

By 1995 even the "visionary" from Redmond had the Internet epiphany.

-Ramon