Comments on: Eclipse on Mac Java 6 Reveals More SWT Shortcomings

By: Chris Herron

Chris Herron — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:59:35 +0000

@Pete
Apple is a business, with finite resources, their own business priorities and shareholder obligations.
They do a huge amount of Java on the serverside and, ironically, use Eclipse for WebObjects development.
Generally speaking, IMHO Apple has a good track record for backwards compatibility. Take Universal binaries and the Rosetta runtime for example.
They avoid obsoleting hardware: its common to be able to run major OS X releases on >=5 year old machines. I can’t say the same for Windows.

Your point about SWT volunteers “porting a Cocoa version to a platform with less than 10% market share.” implies that there’s some special altruism involved that isn’t merited by the size of the installed-base. Yet, Linux has an order-of-magnitude less market share than OS X. What does that mean for the people who worked on SWT-GTK? They all deserve credit – but its fair to assume that the motivation they have in common is to be able to use SWT on their platform of choice: Macs are popular at IBM.

Just as there’s nothing to stop the SWT-Cocoa volunteers from pursuing their goal, there’s nothing to stop the community from developing an open source JDK 1.6+ with support for Swing on Cocoa and for earlier OS X versions. Hence: SoyLatte and the OpenJDK BSD Port: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/bsd-port/

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:59:37 +0000

@Pete, It is an issue with SWT because of it’s dependencies on native code. Granted, I agree with a lot of your points, but of you happen to have a current Mac, Java and Swing support work just peachy. X11 is a sucky solution, the reason anyone gets a Mac is because they want a UI that works

By: Chris Herron

Chris Herron — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:22:10 +0000

I switched to IntelliJ about 2 years ago and never looked back. When I was occasionally using Eclipse on my Mac, I was frustrated with the clunkiness of the SWT Carbon implementation. At the time, I looked at the EOS plugin (SWT implemented in Swing). I wonder is it still usable?

By: Pete

Pete — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 07:24:11 +0000

Hmmm. This is a problem of SWT, how exactly?

Blame Jobs, not the wider software community.

Apple doesn’t update Java for non x86_64 platforms, then breaks backward compatibility by not updating Carbon. planned obsolescence. Not to mention forcing you to always buy the latest OS to run a new version of Java.

it sounds like Apple is hostile to (a) people who run old equipment (b) people who write/use software created in Java (c) people who program in anything other than Cocoa.

SWT volunteers (Some employed by IBM?) graciously are porting a Cocoa version to a platform with less than 10% market share.

Meanwhile, client developers can’t use Java 6 to target as a baseline because there are still Mac users running 32 bit or ppc hardware. Depending on your industry the choice might be to abandon macs for swing or swt entirely.

sorry Ryan but you bought a mac. Run the X11 version in virtualbox!

By: Chris Aniszczyk

Chris Aniszczyk — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:49:26 +0000

Oh, I forgot to mention… if you want to contribute to the Cocoa port.. here is the information:

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/cocoaport.php

By: Chris Aniszczyk

Chris Aniszczyk — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:48:27 +0000

Sure, I understand your point. However, the SWT team has done a good job in catching up. The cocoa port for SWT is in beta form right now and has been available since Eclipse 3.5 M3. 64-bit support is coming in 3.5 M4 which is out in about 2 weeks.

Here is the bug if you’re interested:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=239301