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Sun May Join Eclipse Project

Posted by timothy on from the obvious-pun dept.

ebresie writes "It seems with the possible movement by the Eclipse project towards a more independent entity, Sun may join the Eclipse Effort."

2 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Sun's IDE (Parent not insightfull) by fforw · · Score: 4, Informative

    NetBeans started as a student project in the Czech Republic (originally called Xelfi), in 1996. The goal was to write a Delphi-like Java IDE in Java. A company was formed around this project, called NetBeans. There were two commercial versions of NetBeans, called Developer 2.0 and 2.1. Around May of 1999, NetBeans released a beta of what was to be Developer 3.0 - some months later, in October '99, NetBeans was acquired by Sun Microsystems. After some additional development time, Sun released the Forte for Java Community Edition IDE - the same IDE that had been in beta as NetBeans Developer 3.0.

    There had always been interest in going Open Source at NetBeans. In June 2000, Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE [...]

    (from http://www.netbeans.org/about/history.html)

    Yeah.. Forte didn't work out. It fell in the hands of evil open source communists =)

    --
    while (!asleep()) sheep++
  2. Re:Swing RIP by jilles · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've yet to see any swing problems that are inherent to the technology. Swing looks and feels great on my machine. I use both eclipse and swing applications and I can't notice a difference in responsiveness, look & feel, etc. I have yet to see a single swt UI for which no swing equivalent can be made. Also eclipse is not noticably faster than e.g. JEdit. It could be that your judgement is affected by the lack of hardware acceleration of swing (or 2d graphics in general) under linux. Under windows and mac os x, this is not an issue.

    Admittedly it took until version 1.4.2 of the jdk for swing to catch up. I'd say swt is close to irrelevant in eclipse since it does not even include a GUI builder. Eclipse is mostly used for server side development. I think most eclipse users couldn't care less what particular toolkit is used. They just need a responsive UI and swt/eclipse happens to offer it for them.

    So far the only major application to use SWT that I am aware of (no doubt there are some prototypes somewhere) is eclipse itself. I am aware of a substantial amount of mature swing apps. So to call swing a failure because swt supposedly blows swing out of the water based on a sample of one (1) application seems a bit premature. IMHO IBM wasted time and resources by developing swt. I'm sure it's a decent toolkit but I can't seem to find out what problem with swing it is trying to address or what the added value of swt is for serverside development.

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    Jilles