Well, SWT may be the biggest reason of Eclipse momentum. Swing has long had a bad reputation, it's pointless to fight with that. Besides, Swing has been a major blocking from having alternative Java VMs (IBM? BEA? They license Sun's one!)
Eclipse is already becoming part of Linux distributions. NetBeans never did. Why? Because you can't run it on any free software Java VM. But Eclipse you can, thanks to SWT.
I can't see why SWT fractures the Java community. Who defined Swing? Only Sun. Who things there's a need for something else? Everybody at the Eclipse Consortium, which may have today more members than the JCP, and many free software projects using SWT. So fracturing is just disagreeing with Sun?
Is JCP *the* Java community? No. It's a bunch of companies that sell Java products. It'll become a real community when everyone can observer everything that goes by and vote. Sore today JCP is more transparent than it was before, but it's very far from being "he voice of the community".
Besides that, no real community will have allways the same vision. There'll allways be divergences, and that's what enables evolution. So criticizing whoever has a different opinion is bad for the community.
Swing and SWT can be acomodated together. See for example SwingWT, a free software library which implements the Swing API on top of Swing. Why the JCP doesn't recognize the need for better native integration on the GUI and promotes something similar to SwingWT? So who needs native speed and lokk-and-feel gets, and who needs portability gets also by using the pure-java, traditional Swing. |
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