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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

Comments:

At posted this on my blog as well, but I thought I would post it here as well... I was contacted by someone at Sun who points out a few *MAJOR* items in that post that simply aren't true. I think we should all take that supposed "insider" posting as nothing more than an entertaining read and one persons supposed (maybe true, maybe false) view.

Posted by Jon Lipsky on February 21, 2003 at 09:54 AM EST #

This post in entirely unfair. There's some snippets of truth, however its not clear to everyone which is true and which isn't. Yes, the parcplace products was like Swing. The Digitalk was like smalltalk. The IBM version, was like Swing, I don't think it used native widgets. Take a look at Visualage, in no way did it look native. I was in IBM when the first SWT stuff came out (i.e. JFace), it didn't use a native layer, everything was emulated like Swing. Did it look ugly, well it was much better than the Visualage stuff, that's for sure. Anyway, the article makes it appear that the Swing approach was completely broken. That's a completely unfair conclusion.

Posted by Carlos Perez on February 21, 2003 at 03:35 PM EST #

The only thing that the article makes clear is that the so-called "source close to IBM" has a serious grudge against Swing.

Posted by Dave Johnson on February 21, 2003 at 06:18 PM EST #

There is SOME verifiable truth... I used swing when it was still in the com.sun.* package. It did totally suck. It was a horrible bloated monster. It did get a whole lot better; however its still slow. It is much less buggy. I have to say, the performance is finally acceptable for small applications under jdk 1.4.1_01 though.

Posted by Andy on February 22, 2003 at 04:25 AM EST #

Andy, Acceptable only for small appications?! C'mon, that's also an unfair comment. Take a looke at IDEA and JBuilder, those are both fairly large applications, they work considerably well don't you think? Carlos

Posted by Carlos Perez on February 24, 2003 at 09:25 AM EST #

Carlos: Andy did not say "only small applications," you added the word "only." Neither JBuilder or IDEA (or Eclipse for that matter) are exactly "snappy" UIs.

Posted by Dave Johnson on February 24, 2003 at 10:44 AM EST #

WSAD isn't exactly snappy (I use it all the time). I hear eclipse by itself isn't so bad. That just goes to show that a lot of performance issues are the result of the application not the GUI framework. I will say though that Swing has a tendency to be slow with menu's. Click on a native menu then click on a swing menu and you really notice the difference.

Posted by Glen Stampoultzis on February 26, 2003 at 05:52 PM EST #

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