[Qt-jambi-interest] Some questions about Qt Jambi

[Aekold Helbrass]

2009/12/31 José Arcángel Salazar Delgado <arcangel.salazar at gmail.com>:
>> Hi Tom,
>> Thanks for the fast response!
>> Which UI framework do you think has the most secure future in terms of
>> compatibility with new operating systems and fixing bugs? While searching
>> the net I found that there were a lot of people saying that Swing isn't
>> updated for about 10 years or so. Is this true?
>>
>> I think it will be a choice between SWT or Qt Jambi... Not sure which one
>>  to pick...
>>
>> The UFaceKit you pointed out also looks interesting but then I still need
>>  to choose a UI framework to start with :-). Will UFaceKit work with things
>>  like charts? Or more advanced stuff like drag & drop?
>>
> Hi, has I know, the gui field in java is something "end" for sun. AWT and
> SWING aren't updated with new features for long ago. In the other side SWT is
> only a wrapper of GUI frameworks (carbon in MACOS, GTK in linux and native in
> windows).
> qt jambi is not dead, but has some troubles in their maintenance.
>
> If you need something quick to learn an develop and your app lifecicle is less
> that 3 years, go with qt jambi. if not, go with SWT.
>
> P.D: decouple well your app, from the GUI framework.

My few cents...

1. It is almost true that public API of Swing was not updated for very
long. But, it is still maintained, and internally it get's better. For
example you can start older NetBeans (written in plain Swing) on JDK
1.4 and the same version on JDK 1.6 - you will see the difference at
once. And of course Sun's "backward compatibility paranoia" will
guarantee that your application will most surely work with next
versions of JDK.

2. Swing written in Java, and for me as for Java developer - it's
blessing, because you can hack very deep inside of it, up to Graphics
(which is native). It allows you to perform veeeery deep
customizations, create highly complex components for your own and so
on. While both SWT and Jambi allows you to "paint" your own components
- they have less possibilities to customize existing ones.

3. Both Swing and Qt have clean and simple API, which will help you to
maintain projects. As for me SWT's API is ass-ugly, with that stupid
"constructor of component requires parent component to add itself", or
that idea that "Java sucks, let's turn off GC and free memory
ourselves"... Well, I don't know, it's almost enough for me not to
choose SWT over anything, the main idea behind SWT looks ... not right
for me. And of course SWT behavior is different between supported
platforms, while in Swing and Qt are mostly the same. Yea, I know that
there are many people who thinks different, but it works with all
SWT-based apps I used.

4. And of course José is totally right - decouple your app.