Re: IDE?

[Jim White <jim at pagesmiths dot com>]

At 12:35 AM 12/16/2001 -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
>randal.sims@srs.gov wrote:
>
>>How do people develop Kawa projects ... command line, (X)Emacs, etc?
>>Has anyone taken a look at extending Eclipse at www.eclipse.org?
>
>...
>Eclipse looks interesting, but I don't know how much is actuality and
>how much is potential.
>
>While glancing through the documents I notice that they have a Standard
>Widget Toolkit that includes some editor with styled text support.
>It occurs to me that it might be worthwhile re-targeting JEmacs
>to use SWT instead of Swing. ...

One of the main things I have been thinking of doing for Kawa for quite 
some time now is implementing support for IFC.  IFC is free and five times 
faster than Swing (IFC was actually supposed to be the "basis" for Swing 
and Sun did use the Netscape IFC developers but Sun's NIH process prevented 
the use of any of the IFC engine).

The approach would be to develop a light glue layer to map the necessary 
API so that both Swing and IFC are supported.  Adding SWT to that would be 
no problem.  An AWT option might also be worthwhile for some applications.

And I do think SWT will be worthwhile because IFC has received no new 
development for years and SWT will not only be supported but has the 
potential for higher performance and better native platform integration 
(rather than AWT's proxy approach they have a thin JNI layer that simply 
maps the OS's GUI API to Java and then all the rest of the platform 
specific code is in Java).

The idea that any free Java will have Swing is very unlikely.  Due to Sun's 
licensing, the massive size of Swing, the impracticality of implementing 
from the API or spec, and Swing's terribly bad performance (which is 
limited by its design and will not be getting any faster) make it not 
worthwhile.  My opinion is that Swing is a major reason for the failure of 
Java on the browser and on the desktop.  I'm certain that IBM feels the 
same way (although they were a big part of the "there can be only One" 
attitude that forced Netscape to give up on IFC, so their doing SWT now 
after that debacle is ironic at least) and that is why they are doing SWT 
(because not only is it impossible to develop the quality GUI applications 
that the market demands in Swing, it can't be done on top of AWT at all, 
which is one of the reasons Swing can't work well).

The only thing I don't like about JDE is that it competes with NetBeans 
(which I've just started using) and thus will dilute support a lot.  If it 
comes about that the same plug-ins work in both environments, then all will 
be well.  If not, then there will be problems.  Of course it may turn out 
JDE is a lot better than NetBeans (once again Sun's inability to shoot 
straight, particularly in licensing, may waste a great deal more potential 
- the problem here is their attempt to segregate some of the NetBeans 
components into the commercial FFJ product) in which case that will be the 
cool thing.

jim
----------------------------------------------------------------
James P. White                 Netscape DevEdge Champion for IFC
jim@pagesmiths.com Pagesmiths' home is http://www.pagesmiths.com
Try Kawa, the Java-based Scheme http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa