Well, I did write a game using SWT and OpenGL, there is support for that. It worked fine. The real fly in that ointment is OSX, it has TERRIBLE support for OpenGL, many of the drivers are so broken you simply cannot get it to work at all .Craig wrote:From what I understand he looked at it but very quickly dismissed the idea because the SWT canvas component is just too feature limited. I know he was keen to move to java 6 because of added features to Java2D, so I see it unlikely he would go SWT where there is pretty much no Java2D.Azhrei wrote:Yeah, Trevor had suggested using Eclipse as the platform for the next MT! But the switch from Swing to SWT would be a huge one. And it didn't seem to provide any benefits significant enough.
You would then have to use the SWT OpenGL component, but if you wanted OpenGL you are better off going with JLWGL or JOGL which are more mature.
There are certainly a lot more downsides than upsides to moving to SWT
I agree, there is no really good HTML component support (that I know of) in SWT though. I'm not sure about SWT being limited, it does everything Swing does, and is really an excellent UI layer, especially if you go higher in the RCP stack and use JFace and some of the other higher level Eclipse machinery. Roughly duplicating the existing Maptool UI for instance would be very straightforword. It would however be a total UI rewrite and basically a lateral move. It MIGHT be a long-term gain but then I really know nothing much about the UI toolkit you guys use now, so I'm not really qualified to say...
I've heard rumors of Netbeans RCP, never actually seen it in action. I'm kind of wedded to Eclipse and the concept of writing the application effectively as a set of Eclipse plugins has its appeal. Netbeans however is certainly a pretty mature IDE. My guess is it will be sort of pa-tay-toe vs pah-tah-toe. One thing I can say against the Eclipse RCP is that it is VERY crufty with old obsolete but still supported APIs and such, and unless you can talk to one of the internal IBM Eclipse devs it is harder than heck to sort out which ones you should use and which are just legacy stuff left in there to support ancient Eclipse plugins. So maybe a brandy new snazzy RCP would be a better choice, unless you happen to have an Eclipse core developer wandering around here with a lot of time to donate!One thing we should keep an eye on is the Netbeans RCP (think of it as Eclipse's swing RCP competitor). Given that Oracle stated Netbeans will be their Java development editor of choice -- they also have another IDE JDeveloper and contribute quite a bit to Eclipse -- hopefully they will update Netbeans GUI with the new JavaFX 2.0 goodies (HTML 5 and all that) and that could become a viable candidate for a platform -- we could finally get rid of the current docking framework, yay!!!Azhrei wrote: Especially considering that the announced roadmap for Java 7 includes HTML5 support in Swing for 2011. (Probably one of the things that MT most sorely lacks is a good HTML implementation.)
Of course, if MT 2.0 does make that switch, we'll already have OSGi support under our belts and the transition will be much smoother!