One comes from Sun, the other comes from IBM. One emulates native look & feel, the other uses the platform’s widgets.

For a long time, Swing and SWT developers saw these two toolkits as conflicting. Today, it is no longer an either-or choice. Eclipse provides a bridge between the two toolkits, called SWT_AWT. On top of that, the project Albireo provides smoother integration. Both together allow you to embed Swing components so well that the user cannot know he is using different toolkits.

Albireo has just seen its first alpha release. It is available for download from the project wiki page:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Albireo_Project

The download page is here:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Albireo_Download

and the basic documentation is here:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Albireo_Documentation

Albireo is sponsored by ILOG S.A. and by SAS Institute Inc.

At the moment, Albireo does not provide a solution for the problem of the distinct event threads; developers have to use invokeLater and asyncExec every time in this area.

For the ILOG JViews components, however, a solution to this problem is available as part of JViews; it allows you to embed JViews components into SWT GUIs without thinking at multithreading.

Tags: Albireo, AWT, Eclipse, event thread, RCP, Swing, SWT

Posted by Bruno Haible in Eclipse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.