This is taken from a blog called "choosing". If you have any evolving this email is true, but you can open its original link (in a discussion group of Yahoo). If this email is true, it is really interesting. No one said in detail the SWT / SWING story.
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Translation translation: FOOSLEPER
Translation: This article comes from the straight_talking_java at YahoGroups.com discussion group, which is already more than a year ago. Alan Williamson is edited by Java Developers Journal, which comes from a source of message in IBM. I have seen a lot, NetBeans and Eclipse are also much more. Translator translation This article is not to arouse what dispute, nor is it to support which side (although I am standing on SWT), I don't want to attack Amy. My most important reason is that this is an interesting article. There is inside, line people, company politics, monopoly giants, beauty, business style ... enough to take a movie. Interesting, this is enough. However, this article reflects IBM's view of Swing and SWT, there is still a nutritious.
From: Alan Williamson
Date: WED NOV 6, 2002 10:31 Amreply-to:
TO:
Subject: SWT ... The scoop? (SWT ... insider?)
Ok, let's come ... Read ... Digestion ... Read ... Removal ...
Thank you for your reply. I am happy to give you some information behind Swing and SWT, since you still regard me as your secret "IBM insider line".
If you want to figure out why everything is so confusing, you have to talk about only AWT a few years ago. Sun has established a basic set of portable controls, which are mapped to native widgets on different operating systems. Obviously, the next step should continue to enhance this model, except for the initial CUA 92 component (text, Buttons, etc.), continue to add forms, trees, notepads, slides, etc. ... At the time, the AWT was still full of vulnerabilities, and it could not be called reliable. They also need Sun's CODER to repair. Sun's developers are always accustomed to publicly blaming their bugs as the difference in operating systems, such as "Windows and OS / 2 focus order" or "between Ctrl-x. The behavior is different ", as well as other pale retro, so that the criticism is removed from the truth of the code this problem from SUN. Then Amy Fowler came to Sun. Not my big man, Amy is a smart beauty, most developers who stay in brain know how to be pinched by her.
Amy from a SmallTalk, called Objectshare, where she is responsible for the UI class library. Compared with Java's history, SMALLTALK has some tragic, with 3 huge SmallTalk companies ?? IBM, PARC-Place and Digitalk. In the early 1990s, the market share of 3 companies is roughly equal, life is beautiful. PARC-Place uses the design of the Emulated Widget (ie, Swing Design), IBM and DIGITALK use native widgets. Later IBM overwhelmed the other two, so they intend to merge into one, assume that Parc-Place Digitalk. Subsequently when they tried to integrate their products, they broke out when they were called Jigsaw, and they planned to fail to fail due to political reasons (developers can actually make it running), they are native and patterned. Dead war. Amy has won the spiritual victory, but we have won all their business in IBM, because the two companies did not do anything in addition to quarrels. When the dust set, PPD (Parc-Place Digitalk has been renamed Objectshare, the same reason for the WINDSCALE is renamed for SELLAFIELD. "The stock price of disaster that happened before) has dropped from $ 60 to 1 US $ 1. 1 share. They disappeared from the NASDAQ since the pseudo-reported income was disappeared. At this point, Sun is walking with a similar technical direction similar to PPD, so the technicians of PDD have cast their resume to Sun. Amy was hired, she promised to solve all window components through a lightweight solution, so the Sun management made her a head of the GUI development department. She is holding "The original people are doing, I am coming to solve" the key coming in. Then Amy hired all her old friends in Parc-Place and let them develop Swing. Obviously Swing should only become a drawing framework, use people who wish to create map software or drawing software, in any case, should build it around the AWT class, buttons, the button, still handed over to the AWT. Sun's people such as Philip and Mark have allowed AWT to handle tables, trees, and notepads (Notebook, "), so Swing direction should be said clearly. But those who ruin the PDD don't do it, they have to make everything lightweight. Due to the ignorant of Sun Management, plus Amy ruthless political means, it has caused the chaos that we see today. Amy also makes Sun believes Swing is a part of the Mozilla project to be developed with Netscape, in fact, this is just her propaganda.
In IBM, we won swings from the first day. Greg, full is wrong, and it is ugly. The original our tools such as Visualage for Java is written with SmallTalk (used by native window components), so when we migrate these tools to the Java code library, we need a set of window components. The developers of IBM are the batch of people who are originally SMALLTALK. We are very reluctant to build a WebSphere Studio tool for management requirements. Swing is a terrible monster. In the initial preview of WebSphere Studio, all our customers hate it because of its appearance, regardless of its appearance, regardless of its function. Most consumers will buy a car that makes people feel ugly, even if this car has an excellent engine. So we started a project, which ported our SmallTalk native window components to Java. This project is made by the Object Technology International Group of Canada. This project has been successful and is used in the VisualAge Micro Edition product we have released, and Visualage Micro Edition later became a very successful IDE in J2ME development. However, OTI discovered that Swing had a very serious defect in reading Windows events, and we even could not even perform SWT (S is SIMPLE abbreviation, but later turned into STANDARD's abbreviations) and interoperability between SWING. They used a way to leave a memory vulnerability during the event queue, so we have to use our own query of the loop of the Windows event queue to correct this error. We tried again and again to let Sun fix this error, but Amy is not in, so we decide SWT and AWT / SWING can't coexist. We even defined your own Point and Rectangle classes in SWT. There is no dependence on AWT or SWING throughout the toolkit. We put this tool to Eclipse, this is a tool platform, its overall design goal is to defeat Micrsoft and Visual Studio. Eclipse is open source, so anyone can build their own things above, we have transplanted companies like TOGETHERSOFT and RATIONAL. Our competitors are Microsoft, so all our efforts and attention are from front to Microsoft.
No matter how SUN is very dissatisfied. Their NetBeans is the same thing with Eclipse, so they complain to the IBM high-level. They think SWT is to be tied to Windows, which is purely non-said, because SWT can run on Mac / Linux through GTK, and a large plug-in platform. They refused to get Eclipse to get Java certification, because there is native code, so the Eclipse product must carefully use the word "java" of the "Java" SUN trademark. Eclipse can't even call himself a Java IDE, Sun has threatened to take legal action to stop IBM at any time as a Java IDE. One of the results is the GUI design tool created on Eclipse, allowing you to build Swing / AWT GUI, but do not let you drag and drop the SWT window control inside. It is completely possible to separate SWT from Eclipse, just put the DLL out of the path and use the window component toolkit to develop your bank or insurance or other applications to develop GUI. Once again, we can't make further, because Sun is tied to our hands. Although as part of the Eclipse open source protocol, CPL allows us to provide such a solution, but Sun is clearly clear that they don't want us to do. For the user community, no matter what IBM and Sun's final motivation, I found that there is always a very interesting: love Swing will always say "once you spend a few years to master it, you can use it correctly. It is basically that they are trying to demonstrate and maintain their hardware useful purposes; while SWT's supporters are "Wow, this is really fast, this is the same as the native, you can also use XP Skin ... it is also light and small. " One sentence is what I like. One of our users said that Swing is like Java decided not to achieve native IO through the operating system, but by the magnetic head motor API to read the disks. Swing is basically like this, it holds a bottom "Paint (Graphics) method to draw all the window components. --------------------------------------original
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