Wednesday June 30, 2004

Swing vs. SWT

I am blogging at Moscone, waiting for our i18n BOF session to start...

One of the interesting sessions I saw today was the Swing vs SWT panel session (well, title may be different, but something like that). Both creators of Swing and SWT were there, and gave their toolkit explanation in 10 minutes, and then the users for those toolkits (NetBeans for Swing, and another IDE for SWT) expressed how they think about those toolkits. After that, they answered the attendee's questions and they went into an endless battle, well not really.

I expected more like a heated battle, but it was kind of a cooperative discussion. One phrase they said that I liked most was something like, "The concepts of those toolkits are different, Swing focuses on the cross platform compatibility, on the other hand, SWT focuses on exploitation of the native platform functionality. They are complementary to each other." I think this explains all and let the developers decide which toolkit they think it is suitable for their applications.