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Maybe you have books to recommend. Please provide any helpfull info you got (libraries to suggest, tricks, etc...) that would help a newbie to jump start quickly on this platform.

Could one, for instance, now compile a Java program using the SWT library to a native binary using GCJ, so it could be run without using a JVM?

Yes.

SWT takes a middle ground between the extremes of AWT and Swing, and abandons a sacred cow of Sun's- the idea that the same binary must run on all platforms without any modifications. This attitude has really been an albatross around Java's neck and is the reason everyone thinks that Java applications have to be cheesy- because Sun demands that they must be equally cheesy everywhere!

AWT takes the approach that ALL widgets are drawn by the native layer. This isn't a bad idea, except that if no native widget is available (like a slider, or tree), AWT refuses to improvise one at the Java level. This is why there are no sliders or trees in AWT, even on platforms like Windows where native widgets for both are present, because there's some platform out there somewhere that doesn't have them. Maybe AIX or something, who knows. AWT is strictly lowest-common-denominator and that's why everyone hates it.

People bitched and moaned. So Sun went straight to the opposite extreme with Swing, which refuses to even consider the native widgets. Instead, it uses Java level methods to draw pictures of them to fool you. This means that Swing can offer you a "pluggable look and feel", so you can have Motif buttons on Windows, or "Metal" buttons on the Mac! Except nobody cares. Microsoft promptly kicked Swing in the nuts by introducing skins with XP, so it becomes obvious what is really Windows and what is pretending to look like Windows but can't keep up. And Swing suffers greatly from the second system effect- it's overengineered as hell. A Hello World in Swing gobbles up 20 MB of overhead- mostly classes loading and initializing themselves. In fact, Swing is why AWT is still alive. AWT sucks, but you can run a program that lasts for more than a couple minutes with it. Writing stable applications with Swing is a real art. (It is in AWT too, but only because Sun has pretty much left AWT flapping in the wind with minimal improvements, maintenance, or bug fixes. Since Swing came along, AWT has been treated like a red-headed stepchild by Sun.)

SWT is much more like AWT than Swing, except that it takes a practical middle ground- something Sun doesn't seem capable of doing at all! It offers you a nice set of native widgets. If a slider or a tree isn't available on some platform, they draw a picture of one for you. This might make sliders and trees look funny on platforms that lack sliders and trees, but you would expect things to look funny on those platforms. People using Windows (i.e. most of them) aren't bothered by any of this.

This sacrifices binary compatibility. Each platform has its own version of the SWT library. For example, there is a Windows specific swt.jar and a swt.dll that goes with it, and there is a Solaris version of swt.jar and a native swt.so library that it uses. Even though the libraries are implemented completely differently, the public interfaces are the same. So if you develop a program against the Windows version of the SWT library, you won't have any problem compiling against the Linux version. (Although I've heard that SWT blows on Linux, but that was a while ago and I don't know what the current state is.)

SWT doesn't abstract much away from you, unlike AWT, where you are separated from the low level GUI details by a leaky abstraction. In SWT you have to write the frigging event loop yourself! (Which is not a big deal- it's a while loop, usually two lines.) There are a few other gotchas, and you absolutely have to test a SWT program on all platforms you're releasing for, but in practical terms the same was always true for AWT because of the leakiness of its abstraction. SWT at least doesn't pretend that you don't have to worry about this stuff.

This means you have to compile and test a program three times before releasing it, once for Windows, once for Linux, once for Mac. This violates Sun's sacred cow of binary compatibility. But when you're releasing a Java application, you're going to make separate installers for each platform anyway, because you have to bundle a JVM for everybody. So it's not really a big deal, unless you're writing an applet- and applets went the way of the dodo long ago in no small part because of AWT and Swing!

With SWT, you can make really nice, professional looking programs. The layer between you and the OS is very thin (JNI). If your program looks silly or stupid, it's YOUR fault. When the user changes the skin in XP, your SWT programs will pick up the change right away. In fact, it isn't even obvious that you're not using C! You can write your stuff in Java and actually get away with it! So that's why I think SWT is the future (if there is any future left anymore) of Java on the client, and why I will be junking AWT/Swing completely when starting new projects.

For more info see the SWT FAQ. There is some GCJ and SWT info available here.

I just downloaded eclipse and found the interface horrible and awkward. The source editor is tiny and everything needs to be added as a plugin. Click on the plugins and a million tabs obstruct the view for the source editor. I only use 1024 x 768 resolution so maybe the designers had bigger monitors but it was unbearable and difficult to do basic things.

Dev-c++ was easy. I just selected "new project" and selected the project I wanted. No bizaare menu's obstructing my menu space. Just a class browser and a source editor. When you compile a project with Dev-C++, the debugger and compiler log pop out just like Visual c++. Its very well integrated. The only downside is its very c/c++ oriented while Eclipse is java oriented with beta level c++ support.

Eclipse screenshots are here and devc++ is here.

I'm sorry, but I think you haven't looked enough ... How about Eclipse ?

yah, 'cos eclipse is just a piece of shite, bah...

I cast a vote for SWT. That's the toolkit developed by IBM et. al. for the eclipse project. It allows you to write your GUI in Java, with native bindings on a variety of platforms for a conventional look and feel (GTK or Motif on Linux/Unix; Windows and Mac too). I've used it a bit and found it very functional and pleasant to code with. It's also very straightforward to yank the SWT out of the eclipse package, and the whole thing is under an LGPL-like license (CPL), as far as I can tell.

I don't *think* you're trolling, but you *are* missing the point. There is more than one way to make money from software, and some of them are perfectly compatible with Open Source software.

Do you think IBM release their contributions to Apache, or to Eclipse for reasons of "love, caring, thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, vision, hope, intellect wisdom or sharing"? No, clearly IBM's bottom line is profits for their shareholders.

Open Source *can* be akin to volunteer work, but it isn't always. Alan Cox gets paid good money for hacking the Linux kernel.

On the other hand, would you really want your kids to see the message you've just posted "it's OK to compromise any ethics you have, if it helps you and yours"? Would you care to take your kids into a charity shop, to watch you explain to the volounteer help the folly of their ways? Is that "raising your kids the way they should be"?

Nothing would be worse than M$ buying borland. It would be the end of JBuilder--a fantastic java IDE. Not to mention delphi and KYLIX! This would be B*A*D.

given the licensing of JBuilder it fits perfectly into the microsoft product range. (restrictive, enforced, single-user licenses for about 4000 Euro per place)

this was the reason the company I worked at chose NetBeans over JBuilder.

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Has anyone noticed that Eclipse's home page is no longer what it used to be?

Is IBM droping the project after it buys Rational?

I am a Java programmer myself (laugh it up), but Swing just plain annoys me.

Eclipse is better anyway.

Well ok, there's no GUI builder for it yet, but eclipse is very active in development, and the 2.0 branch is excellent.

IBM's XMI work continues. A few months ago, they quietly open sourced EMF. It is not a modelling tool itself, but it includes a clean meta-model to support class modeling and a code generation facility, and its persistance format is XMI.

Will this technology make it into Rose and XDE?

As one example, IBM sells VisualAge for Java (a Java IDE), but they are also heavily involved in "giving away" Eclipse, which is also a Java IDE that is somewhat open/free (under something called the "Common Public License"). Here is Eclipse's licensing faq.

As one example, IBM sells VisualAge for Java (a Java IDE), but they are also heavily involved in "giving away" Eclipse, which is also a Java IDE that is somewhat open/free (under something called the "Common Public License"). Here is Eclipse's licensing faq.

we are mostly a hardware company

Not even hardly. IBM is mostly a services company (over half of IBM's employees and about half of their revenue hail from the services division). Over the last year, IBM has sold off a lot of its hardware lines, including -- most recently -- its hard drives.

We also sell a set of software engineering tools

That they do. However, you linked to VAGenerator, a product that is being sunsetted. What they DO produce is the Open Source-based (i.e. Eclipse-based) WebSphere Studio Application Developer.

we'll probably integrate Rational's tools with that

You betcha -- but a lot of it has already been done. WSAD already integrates with ClearCase. Rational also has a product called Rational XDE that already gives somewhat-Rose-like integration into WSAD.

Er, what about their Eclipse project? Or the excellent references and projects at their DeveloperWorks Linux Zone? Not to mention that my current kernel supports JFS and EVMS... I could go on, but you get the picture. Bear in mind that the server and the mainframe enterprise stuff is IBM's bread and butter; it's their core business to do enterprise stuff like that. I'd bet you'll see some desktop stuff from them, but it'll take a while.

would be nice if the features of rational rose would get integrated to the awesome eclipse ide, which is a ibm project, but opensource. Even if as propierty commercial extension, but getting that stuff integrated would be worth the money, I think.

It seems it's about time for IBM to demonstrate their loyalty to Free Software and Open Source by open sourcing Rational Rose ...

I didn't read all thousand pages, no. Nor did I notice any footnotes that numbered as high as 75 and 78. The footnote I referred to was on page 780.

As for AWT, sure it's covered, but is SWT covered? Nope. This dispite the fact that it takes the best of AWT and Swing and combines them together in a stable, fast GUI package. The author talks about how great Eclipse is as an IDE, but decides to ignore the reason Eclipse is so wonderful... SWT.

Or perhaps people have forgotten about the Eclipse Project. Cross platform with native GUI bindings including win32, GTK, and Motif (ack!). I've worked with it a little and it is definitely a departure from swing; having to actually free graphic resources feels odd after having it done automagically for you for so long.

1) It's big and slow. Very big. Very slow. Java apps/applets aren't usable on my P2 266

2) It has the worst marketing and learning curve in the history of computer programing. All those acronyms above are real. Sun's J2EE "platform" -- platform? what the fuck is a platform? -- is used as a generic term by PHBs everywhere. To anyone that hasn't taken courses on Java, it's meaningless.

Hmm... nice little program. I've been using Eclipse (Eclipse.org) for a while, and am quite happy with it. IDEA has a few nice features that Eclipse doesn't have (or that I haven't found in Eclipse yet ;)), such as code collapsing and Live Templates. But Eclipse *is* fast, easy to use, easier on the eyes than most Swing aps, and priced exactly right (i.e. free).

The problem is that the big players priced the Compiler based Common lisp development frameworks right out of the reach of most business developers. They also failed to take full advantage in the increasing capability of the PC, turning their noses up at in favour of past glories of the Symbolics machines. A good Lisp compiler could factor out the "cons", producing code sometimes surpassing the performance of C++.

The void was filled mostly by C++ and now Java, lesser beasts dispite their current quality standard libraries, overly verbose and fragmented incomparison to Common Lisp elegance.

Today there are open implementation of the lisp compilers, but they still lack a comparable development enviroment to the commercial varients. Sadly, since I started professionally in 1988, I have not had one job or contract were they would consider the adoption of Common lisp, and I have never programed professionally in it. David Betz's XLisp, and later XScheme was the closest I came to using it at work for scripting, and at home for some early AI-planning system hacking that has yet to see the light of day.

In my opinion, IBM's Eclipse IDE has finally comming close to surpassing the old benchmark of the commercial Lisp IDEs, it even has the ability to plug in refactoring tools. But then I can remember when, thanks to the "cons"-ed Lisp, manupulating the source of the program was as easy as mainpulating the data,

Look at the software written twenty five years ago, and look at the software written recently.

Bill Joy wrote vi pretty much by himself. Bram Moolenaar write Vim pretty much by himself; it's a huge superset of Joy's editor.

The original portable C compiler (PCC) was about 5,000 lines of C. No one even blinks if a graduate student writes a far more sophisticated language processor, e.g., a C++ compiler, a complete Java development environment (including a compiler and debugger).

The original SimCity was awesome. No one thinks twice of re-implementing it for a PDA or a Java-enabled web browser.

What's changed? Programmers don't have to worry so much about CPU, disk, or memory limitations. The tools (compilers, libraries, source control) are much improved. Some of the new languages are far more productive. There are also new practices, and the results of lessons learned, on how to do development; some programmers take advantage of these (not enough!)

But our abilities haven't kept up with our aspirations. Compare SimCity to the masively multi-player Sims Online. How do vi or PCC stack up against Eclipse? Look at the text formatters of twenty five years ago, and then look at OpenOffice (or Microsoft's stuff); at Unix v6 vs. Max OS X.

Software hasn't kept up with Moore's Law. We're running a Red Queen's race, going as fast as we can just to stay in one place; and we're losing.

Someone mentioned IntelliJ for a Java IDE. I haven't used that tool, but I have used eclipse 2.0.1 from eclipse.org

It does all that plus a bag of chips!

Seriously, it works well for an IDE. Give it a look. The only thing I don't like is the GTK version doesn't include printing.

I've often thought over the last few years that we've made too little progress in making programmers more productive. I largely blame that on Microsoft, simply because it drives more software development with it's tools than any other entity. One language I've categorically made a decision to avoid is Visual Basic. I have always felt it was basically (sorry) a waste of brain cells. It has certainly done nothing to advance the state of the art.

In my opinion, one of the best things to come along in a long time is Java. The gentle reader may recall earlier posts along those lines. I enjoy C, and have spent the majority of my career doing C and C++. However, I have also spent _way_ too much time tracking down memory-related bugs. Often, they were in third party code. That is no way to run a railroad.

Java addresses almost all of the glaring deficiencies of C++, both in language design and in runtime safety. In my opinion, the best programming tools will be those that enable single programmers to tackle larger and larger projects.

Compared with C++, Java enables me to tackle much more ambitious projects with confidence. A team approach can never attain the efficiency of a single programmer approach. The "sweet spot" of software engineering efficiency is the largest project one person can tackle. Extreme programming is a useful hybrid that attempts to turn two programmers into one programmer. ;-) (Also teams can be nearly as efficient as single programmers if the system is properly decomposed into subsystems separated by simple interfaces. This rarely happens smoothly, in my experience. It takes a top notch group of people.)

One last note on Java - performance is now almost completely on par with C++. On my most recent round of benchmarks, Java (JDK 1.4.1_01) on both Linux and Windows outperformed C++ (gcc 3 and VC 6) on most tests. Dynamic compilation and aggressive inlining are that effective. The VM also soundly spanked the gcj ahead of time compiler in gcc 3. It thoroughly rocks to have truly cross-platform code that runs faster than native! Think how many religous wars would be avoided if 99%+ of software was available on all OS platforms...and think how much it would help Linux! :-)

If you want to see what's out there for Java, download either the NetBeans IDE project, or the Eclipse IDE. Both are free and each has its strong points. NetBeans is a Swing app and includes a Swing GUI designer. Eclipse uses a new open source "native widget wrapper" library from IBM called SWT which has it's interesting points. You'll also need a Java VM (there are also others available from IBM etc.).

One last thought - wouldn't it be cool if web browsers had support for something like Java? I mean, you could deploy apps just by putting them on a web page! It wouldn't matter what the target platform was! What a great idea! (This paragraph was sarcasm in case you were wondering.)

Seamless integration with CVS, automatic refactoring tools, incremental compilation, full integration of unit testing, plug-ins, etc, etc... you owe it to yourself to try this fantastic open-source tool. /t

But if the CDT gets anywhere near their Java Development Environment, I'll be in heaven :-).

But if the CDT gets anywhere near their Java Development Environment, I'll be in heaven :-).

But if the CDT gets anywhere near their Java Development Environment, I'll be in heaven :-).

First, being ashamed of doing VB is silly, don't sweat it, and don't pay attention to idiots who tell you otherwise. I've used VB since it was just 'B' and spent most of my career doing hard-core MS-centric projects and getting paid handsomely for it, thank you. During that decade long period I have:

• Bought a new car every two years
• Met and married a beautiful woman
• Purchased a nice home in an expensive neighborhood
• Bought a sailboat
• Had two wonderful children

That being said, I was finally able to get off the Windows treadmill by adopting Java. I now use Mac OS X exclusively at home.

Java GUIs have a bad rep for being slow, but alot of that is changing, and rapidly. Check out Eclipse and the SWT project. I would easily use even Swing for what you've described. Add in a killer IDE like Borland JBuilder and you have the same things you enjoyed in VB only now its on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

As for compiling, what exactly are you doing? Java now ships with JIT compilers that convert bytecode to native code on-the-fly. Of course you have little control over this process, so it's still not as optimal as hand-optimized C, but hey, what is.

For me, Java has now completely replaced VB, and with a far better, more flexible language to boot. I am completely free of MS constraints as well and the bonanza of open-source Java projects out there just makes the geek in me weep with joy. VB has been good to me, but it just can't compete.

The FSF is also modifying the GNU General Public License (GPL), though the fundamental principles will remain unchanged, according to Stallman.
"We have looked at, for example, adding a clause that explicitly states that you give a patent license when you redistribute the software," Stallman added.


This will hopefully remove some incompatibilityies between the GPL and other free licenses such as the IBM Public License 1.0 used for Eclipse.

From the Oct 2002 issue of Java Developer's Journal, "Swing Is Swinging Java out of the Desktop"
Thinlet and the The Standard Widget Toolkit

This is good stuff. I use thinlets myself.

You grab Eclipse and starting writing Java. (Eclipse is also written in Java ;)

controlling four different compilers (gcc 3.1, Sun Forte, Irix MIPSpro and Visual C++ 7)

Couldn't you just use gcc across all systems? There are also plenty of opensource IDEs around. We use
Eclipse along with ClearCase. Very good for cross platform.

Most of these languages are also supported (or in the process of being supported) in Eclipse. Which is open-source and cross platform and easy to extend.

Well, eclipse started with code donated by IBM, and is a pretty decent effort. There are also developers at IBM working on it I believe (like Netscape/Mozilla). There are also a bunch of improvements they have made to the linux kernel. They have a whole area dedicated to Open Source.
--

> Have you tried JDeveloper?

JDeveloper == crap. It's slow. It's a memory hog. Its project management blows.

Try Eclipse. It's fast, Its got a small memory footprint. Managing your code has never been easier. Did I mention that it's FREE? Try it for one day. It will open your eyes to the utter crap that is JDeveloper.

I am not aware of any other IDE that let you develop in multiple languages AND multiple toolkits

How about Eclipse?

The Java suppor is mature; the C/C++ tools are due for a release by the end of the month; and a Cobol tools project just got underway. "Unofficial" tools projects include Python, C#, AspectJ, Eiffel, Ruby, and others

I am not aware of any other IDE that let you develop in multiple languages AND multiple toolkits

How about Eclipse?

The Java suppor is mature; the C/C++ tools are due for a release by the end of the month; and a Cobol tools project just got underway. "Unofficial" tools projects include Python, C#, AspectJ, Eiffel, Ruby, and others

I am not aware of any other IDE that let you develop in multiple languages AND multiple toolkits

How about Eclipse?

The Java suppor is mature; the C/C++ tools are due for a release by the end of the month; and a Cobol tools project just got underway. "Unofficial" tools projects include Python, C#, AspectJ, Eiffel, Ruby, and others

It looks like Eclipse doesn't support Objective C, though it apparently supports Mac OS X now.

Are there any other good tools for developing Objective C apps on Mac OS X (other than Project Builder and CodeWarrior)?

• Which IDE you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 IDE to commercial ones.
• Which source control you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 source control to commercial ones.
• Which middle tier implementation you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 application servers to commercial ones
• Which database you want to use, ranging from Open Source $0 databases to commercial ones.

In short, you choose J2EE in order to have a choice of what software you want to use within your business and how much you are willing to pay for it, what hardware (Intel, Sun, IBM) and operating systems (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, OS/400) requirements you have, and what requirements you have on the performance (single Intel box to 64 CPU Sun box to IBM mainframe) and scalability of your application.

You make J2EE match your requirements rather than force yourself to match .NET requirements.

Say what you will about CORBA, it's hideously complex and overkill for the desktop.

Come see ORBit, where they didn't bother to implement more hideous and overdeveloped parts of CORBA, and it's in fact pretty straight and efficient. AND, it can serve as a general-purpose ORB at the entry level.

The KDE solution is lighter weight (not crippled-by-design any more than XML is crippled in relation to SGML) solution to their particular problem.

It is a stretch to compare DCOP invention with the coming up with XML (which was a breakthrough hands down). In DCOP, there are fundamental omissions from what is considered industrial strength, mostly exceptions and multiple output parameters, taken, as the developers admit, in the name of performance. Come on, with Moore's law, this point was obsolete by the time they implemented the thing. Did we really need yet another COM workalike made with 133MHz Pentiums in mind?

As for "a powerful C portability/utility library", I don't know what you mean besides libc

I mean glib, which is free for use to anyone with a C compiler, in concert with GNOME/GTK+ or not. This library alone justifies existence of the project.

On the other hand, why doesn't Gnome give us a complete development environment on the scale of KDevelop?

Dunno, it's perhaps because they are all like medieval monks, happy with GNU autotools and Emacs. Phew :-)

The C++ object model is inherently easier to work with

Tell this to developers of language bindings and to distribution vendors making the transition from GCC 2.9x to GCC 3.2. All things come with a price.

The KDevelop environment is the best GUI development environment on Linux.

I, personally, would bet on Eclipse, but this is rather out of the discussion.

This looks like the best introduction:

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design -1/SWT-Design-1.html

What about SWT, as used in eclipse?

I eagerly await the day when i can include GoBe Productive on this list, it is really 'suite' (if you will forgive the pun).

Now with MOz's interface scheme, as with a lot of other cross-platform libraries like Java, QT, etc, it doesn't tie into the OS control toolkit and instead relies on drawing it's own widgets. To do the former would have to break cross-platform ability (I've yet to see a fully cross-platform system that uses the system's native toolkit...

Eclipse.org is now making the Mac build of their outstanding Java IDE available on their download page. This version is using a native carbonized version of the SWT All 2.1 stream drops after September 18th include a Mac build.

Eclipse.org is now making the Mac build of their outstanding Java IDE available on their download page. This version is using a native carbonized version of the SWT All 2.1 stream drops after September 18th include a Mac build.