Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Monday August 01, 2005

Swing and SWT on Windows Vista

It looks like Charles isn't posting with his normal frequency, so this little tidbit hasn't gotten it's normal publicity. :)

It seems a Sun guy has posted some screenshots of various Java apps running in the newly beta'd Windows Vista.

Looking at the screenshots, you'll notice that the Java 1.4.2 and later Swing implementations do a kick butt job of reaching into the bowels of Windows for the right graphics to build a Swing GUI in a native look-n-feel way, but the comparitively native SWT has some kind of leftover peers for buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons.

My previous conclusion on SWT and Swing is that developers need to be conscious of what they're getting into and make the choice that's right for them. I still think that's the case for now. This is just one more datapoint for developers.

Admittedly, the Swing guys may have just done this engineering before Windows went Beta, but I doubt it (I'm not really in a position to know). I'm also sure the SWT guys will be all over this one. But what is the opportunity cost of trying to build/maintain all of the code that does the peer stuff on Windows (old and new), GTK, Mac OS, Motif, etc.?

Interactive Unix mention in "SCO OpenServer Is a Winner"

Hi Steven,

Regarding your article, I don't know for certain, as I'd never really worked with Interactive Unix, but I believe it is in fact Sun, not SCO who acquired Interactive.

I'm in the LA field office of Sun, and until recently, the old Interactive Unix office was still in tact (albiet with a Sun logo) along the side of I-405. We've consolidated it into this office (they were only a few miles apart), but a large number of the Interactive guys are still here on the 9th floor of my building toiling away at Solaris (both x86 and SPARC).

Perhaps there's something more complex to the M&A lineage that I'm not aware of.

- Matt

p.s.: Why do you discriminate between Linux and Unix in the article? "Unix on Intel had long been a niche product, but Linux was bigger and better."

p.p.s.: it does occur to me though that Sun is acquiring Tarantella, which was the old SCO before it sold off the SCO kernel and IP to Caldera, subsequently to be renamed SCO. It's always funny how this stuff works out.

p.p.p.s: I would have posted this as a comment to the article, but the 15 or so required fields to register for eWeek and to be spammed (if I had so chosen, of course) weren't worth the effort. :) instead I'll post it to my blog. Feel free to post any comments there-- no registration required.