Slashdot Mirror
Sun and Eclipse Squabble
gbjbaanb writes "CNET news is reporting on a potential spat between Sun and Eclipse: 'Sun Microsystems has sent a letter to members of Eclipse, urging the increasingly influential open-source project to unify rather than fragment the Java-based development tool market.' Although Sun's letter says it wants interoperability, and a 'broad base' for java tools, it then insists Eclipse should push to be a 'unifying force for Java technology'. Competing tools is a good thing, but it sounds like Sun just wants everything to work its way."
...Slashdot is days late on the scoop. The Java community has already figured out that this is business as usual between Sun and IBM.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Swing and AWT are horrible festering pieces of crap
Maybe not that bad, but not good. We use swing across the board at our company and I can't tell you how hideous each window is. And they look different on every machine. A layout that looks good on my system has buttons cramped in the corner on somebody else's.
And everything runs slow as hell.
Not saying that doing the stuff in C++ would be any easier, but Java's GUI packages are all sorts of shady.
I've tried the 2 of them and they both are pretty decent IMHO. The big difference, and I mean big, is how responsive each are on a fairly moderate system. After starting forte, I can go have a coffee and a smoke and maybe even take a quick nap...at which point forte should be running when I get back and I can then get to work.
Eclipse on the other hand is really fast. When I first tried it I couldn't believe that it was a Java program. It even looks good, rather than that ancient, dull look that most Java apps have.
Since then, I've upgraded to a P4 with 1G ram and they both run pretty good (although Eclipse is still much faster). I do like both of them but Sun and IBM and anyone else interested in furthering Java should collaborate on 1 killer IDE that puts any MS tools to shame, and allows lazy programmers (like me!) to be more productive in less time :) As Eclipse appears superior to forte and probably has the largest installed base (don't know how it compares to Jbuilder) Sun would probably get a lot more respect from developers.
-Pat
First, I dont' think it's realistic to cripple a UI's features for crosscompatibility. Second, looks do count or most people wouldn't switch from Swing's nasty ass metal look.
As opposed to SWT's nasty ass Windows 2000 look.
The people who use IDEA typically have the money to counteract Swing's slow ass performance (this is a good assumption of someone that drops a couple grand for an IDE). On the other hand, most people like me, do not have the money for a nice rig that costs $3000.
This is complete bullshit. IntelliJ IDEA runs fine on a PII-333 laptop with 256Mb of RAM, whereas Eclipse runs like complete shit on the same box. Since I don't have $3000 for the new laptop with specs high enough to run Eclipse, I won't be buying up in order to use it any time soon.
And no, JEdit is not fast enough. That's like saying Netbeans is fast enough. Neither can handle Eclipse's cool coding features on a crappy computer,
Well you're right there, at least, JEdit and NetBeans both stink.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Excuse me? You must be confusing the IBM JVM with the Blackdown JVM from blackdown.org, which is a specialised port of the Sun JVM to Linux.
Faster than a decent implementation can be produced? You're really exaggerating now:
Java has gone from 1.0 (Januari 1995) to 1.4.2 (June 2003, which was 9 months later than 1.4.1, September 2002) to 1.5 (alpha available now, not sure when scheduled for release, I thought the end of this year).
At this moment I can choose between installing Sun 1.4.2, blackdown 1.4.1 and ibm 1.4.1 I on my gentoo box. Then there are also JVMs like JRockit, which is also at 1.4.2.
The are also no major API changes between the point releases (1.4.1 for example added support for Webstart, 1.4.2 added WinXP and GTK look and feel), the rest are only bugfixes.
If only I could come up with a good sig
> You have to dispose of everything explicitly (al la C++) which completely goes against Javas garbage collection paradigm.
GC was not made to clean up (native) resource allocations, but only to reclaim memory. You should bear that in mind.
SWT is a set of graphical tools that allow you to code once, but run on any OS
That's not strictly true. The GUI widgits in SWT are provided by a shared library compiled for the local platform and linked to Java code with JNI.
This means you need a shared library compiled and tested for your platform. To see what platforms are currently supported and the status of those platforms, check out the port status section of the eclipse homepage.
My impression of SWT is it's more feature rich than AWT, faster and nicer looking than Swing, but the downside is it won't necessarily run on any platform that supports Java.
Instead, they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun, and used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
You've got to be kidding. SWT is entirely non-proprietary and open source--you can implement it freely, you can change it, you can use the code, whatever.
That is in sharp contrast to Swing. Not only are there no open source implementations of Swing, you can't even implement it without satisfying a boatload of legal requirements imposed on you by Sun.
Hats off to Sun's PR department: they have lots of people like you thinking that black is white.
Consider this: Java on *any* platform also needs some sort of native library for GUI access. It just turns out that they happen to bundle this with the JRE. In fact, if Sun was willing to ship Java without AWT (as it's commonly used in an server environment), they could probably port it to more platforms. Right now, SWT supports the vast majority of the machines currently running Java (Windows/Linux/Solaris/AIX/OS X), but even more "fringe" platforms like QNX.
And it does it pretty well. This is what AWT should have been. The fact that it actually uses the underlying environment effectively means they don't have to update their look and feel every time one of their platforms releases a new UI. As a result, applications look like other native apps, including "themes" and such.