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Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and Java

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Friday Feb 21, 2003

A terrible, buggy, monster.

I found this very interesting read on the history of AWT, Swing, and SWT fom an undisclosed source via Roller user Jon Lipsky's blog. Here is a tasty excerpt:

Alan Williamson's mysterious "source close to IBM": At IBM we hated Swing from day one. Big, buggy, and looks [like] crap. Initially our tools such as VisualAge for Java were all written in Smalltalk ( which used native widgets ) so when we started to migrate these to a Java codebase we need a widget set. All of the IBM developers are the same crowd who used to work with Smalltalk, and we reluctantly under management orders built our WebSphere Studio tools using Swing. It was a terrible, buggy, monster. In our initial previews when it was demo'd against Microsoft Visual Studio products all our users hated it just because of how it looked, never mind what it let you do. Most shoppers don't like to get in car that looks and smells terrible, even if it does have a nice engine.
UPDATE: Jon Lipsky was contacted by somebody at Sun who claims there are many and major inaccuracies in the above story.

Dave in Java Comments[7]

Tags: Java

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