Article:		Make Your Swing App Go Native, Part 3
Subject:		Is that the idea of Swing?
Date:		2004-02-01 04:59:18
From:		ascscr
Sorry, although this article series presents worthy technics which possibly help some people alot when solving trivial-looking, but not so trivial to implement features, it misses a central point: What in the hell brings be that 'write-once-run-everywhere' paradigm if I either end up with digging somewhere in the dirt and being again platform-dependent (as the article shows), or having a mediocre application and my boss pointing with fingers at me? Swing *has* failed to establish an unique platform (defined by the 'Metal' look&feel) because that Metal look and feel is commonly considered ugly. So the question is again - is Swing ready for big-scale cross-platform GUI development? I think the answer is no, and this article was a proof by example. We can only hope that some of the things shown in the article will one day appear *inside* Swing. If I can ask as a Java programmer whether my menu bar is sticking on the window or global, if I can use pre-made components that hide the diversity of idioms ('exit', 'quit'), if I can inspect (or, even better if it happens automatically by the use of these pre-made components) the key bindings for common actions - then it's not truly 'write-once-run-everywhere', but a close as one can get. So, Swing people, cross-platform does not end at the layout of the file selection box. That's only the starting point.