Eclipse LAF: HUH?
I periodically try Eclipse just to see what the enemy has been up to, and to gauge the exact pitch and volume of my laugh in his face. So, as part of that exercise, I grabbed a recent integration build. Usually I manage to last about 3 minutes before deleting the whole thing off my OSX box.
Imagine the ear splitting screams of joy that burst forth after waiting the obligatory two minutes for Eclipse to start, upon viewing its spiffy new look.
Now, maybe I’m a deranged psychopath with a dubious mental state. Maybe I live in a crazy world where I constantly reinvent the past. However, I’m still convinced that when I first started using Swing (version 0.4), one of the revolutionary new claims was the LAF stuff. It’s nice to see that after years of bragging about how great native components are (AWT equivelant) SWT fools are just now finding out what swing did a few years ago. What next, pluggable LAFs? A ‘look and feel’ menu item? Perhaps after a while they’ll realise that people find it difficult and annoying having to use native code to write a new LAF, and so SWT becomes pure java. Teehee!
What the hell were those people thinking? How will SWT bigots justify this? The whole rationale, the underlying premise behind SWT’s very existence is the native look. Take that away and what do you have? A weird looking MFC app. I don’t know about you lot, but I for one have absolutely no interesting in weird looking MFC apps, and like my Java to be just that; Java.
March 4th, 2004 at 5:36 pm
First comment!
Man, this is way too tame! Not a s**t or a f**k to be seen.
March 4th, 2004 at 5:39 pm
Weee, this was one of the shortest biles so far.
That said, it was also very precise: there’s just no point in what the SWT/Eclipse guys are doing, besides turning the overall Eclipse look and feel into an ugly mess with slanted curves all over the place, wasting screen “real estate” with barely cosmetic cues.
And I think I should point out that I’m actually an Eclipse fan. Maybe I should know better…
March 4th, 2004 at 5:40 pm
“maybe I’m a deranged psychopath with a dubious mental state”… i think that’s a little more than a maybe, bub, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
i’m surprised that it comes as a shock that you can build a sophisticated user interface using native components. you don’t any any “interesting” [sic] in wierd looking MFC because you use Cocoa. take a look at GarageBand to get an idea of an alternative user interface that can be built with native components, the rest of you try out windows media player.
swt is an alternative. eclipse is proving that you didn’t need to build 400 layers of java code just to get a few curves in your user interface.
March 4th, 2004 at 5:42 pm
dang, that was meant to be “you don’t have any interesting”…
March 4th, 2004 at 5:56 pm
i don’t like the new eclipse l+f either. but damn, has something got into hani’s brain recently. this bile is dull dull dull. again.
March 4th, 2004 at 6:10 pm
New LnF is the most controversial Eclipse ‘feature’. There are vigorous conversations on Eclipse Bugzilla and some things will be reverted, for sure.
March 4th, 2004 at 7:05 pm
I think people are way to fast to jump the gun! Eclipse is not due until June, and I think the new laf shows great promise. Of course they’re going to anti-alias it and generally improve upon it. I like the round curves.
March 4th, 2004 at 8:05 pm
The new LAF is horrendous in every sense of the word. It goes against the whole LAF thing SWT was trying to achieve in the first place. If it stays, I will not. If I can choose the current LAF and not the new LAF I will stay.
March 4th, 2004 at 10:04 pm
for once i disagree. the new l&f makes eclipse ever so slightly less gimpy looking on osx and windows. however the funny thing is it still seems slow as crap, even through all this native code. and the whole point was to make it faster. sure, SWT may be faster… but what do we have besides azureus? I know for damn sure eclipse is a slow bitch… so what if it’s native, when I had the job done in IDEA in half the time? even setting eclipse aside, what do i gain besides my cocoa file dialogs from an SWT app (azureus)? not much.. faster drawing times in the GUI event loop, but that’s about it from what I can see.
I like the idea of SWT: yes, Swing is slow. but you have to defeat Swing to make it worth the effort. and SWT doesn’t quite come close. C# and Java can make native apps on Windows and OSX now. why fuck around with this clusterfuck of shit? the API is a mess…. thus negating the clean javaness of it all! drop this crap and use Cocoa and C# and write a java core, or something!
March 4th, 2004 at 10:06 pm
Look at Photoshop, it’s a healthy combination of native and emulated widgets. I don’t hear anyone complaining about response-time, usability or nativeness for Photoshop. In fact, if Photoshop dumped its emulated widgets I think people would leave it.
March 4th, 2004 at 10:10 pm
one thing I have to hand to eclipse though. what other free java ide’s offer that kind of syntax aware editing and refactoring?
March 4th, 2004 at 10:15 pm
one thing I have to hand to eclipse though. what other free java ide’s offer that kind of syntax aware editing and refactoring?
March 4th, 2004 at 10:50 pm
I was really pissed that you didn’t insult Andy Oliver in this post like the last few.
March 5th, 2004 at 1:15 am
Software engineers produce code. A bunch of software engineers produce look and feels.
March 5th, 2004 at 1:45 am
I have the M7 build, it’s pretty stable, but for no apparent reason, I’ll click in the editor to start editing something, and it will take like a frigging minute before I can edit. I figured memory, but I have 650MB of ram and nothing else running, my memory resources show that I have over 400MB of physical memory left. So I don’t know if the GUI is just getting a lot slower or what.
Hani hit one thing on the nose though. The big “use SWT over Swing..its native” thing was all about how SWT made the UI look like a native app. It doesn’t look anything like native any longer, so the push for using SWT doesn’t seem all that important.
And Swing, slow? Come on, JDK 1.4.2 has improved on it vastly. We are displaying large table sets of data, scrolling, and huge trees with no noticeable slowness on 1Ghz 256MB machines. Much like how OSX 10.3 sped up the OS using the same hardware, JDK 1.4.2 has done the same. JDK 1.2 Swing was much slower on the same hardware than JDK 1.4.2 is.
You know what make Swing slow, bad Swing programmers. Especially those that think they are the shit and can code a GUI. I was one of those, still am sometimes. But at least I can be fair and acknowledge that Swing is not all that slow anymore. And with entry level machines at dellradio.come coming with 2.6Ghz cpus, 256MB to 512MB ram and 32MB or more video for around $400, I’d say the only people complaining about Java being too slow are those using old hardware. I realize that native is still faster in some cases, but the latest Iv’e been reading shows JDK 1.4.2 doing about 80% of native performance, above 90% in some areas, and a bit below in others. Not half bad for being able to move it to any platform consistently, something you still can’t do with SWT.
I love Eclipse, so much so that I have built my own plugin engine similar to how Eclipse works, using load/unload/reload plugins, plugin.xml, extension points and extensions, dependencies, etc. The team that came up with that nailed it! I am also working on a full Swing UI built around it, similar to the RCP, but I’ll be providing a number of widgets ready to use for plugin developers as well. You can find the plugin engine at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/genpluginengine. Feel free to join up on the list, contribute, etc.
March 5th, 2004 at 3:45 am
ECLIPSE SUCKS
March 5th, 2004 at 5:59 am
Anonymous wrote : ECLIPSE SUCKS.
Maybe marcf ought to give it a try, he’s always looking for something that sucks …
March 5th, 2004 at 6:36 am
People should refresh their JDK/JVM knowledge, i cant hear this “Swing is slow” crap anymore, it was true years ago, but as mentioned here before, since 1.4.x things went into the right direction. With 1.5 and shared core classes, things will get even faster. I know these SWT freaks have to say this, because otherwise they would look totally weird by using a GUI layer which is a pain to program and where the code looks disgusting.
The same people admit that IDEA is a nice piece of software and is quite responsive after all. Perhaps someone should tell them that this is swing and nothing else.
I dont want to trashtalk about eclipse, its a nice effort and its one of the better IDEs around, but dont promote their GUI layer in the java community as its the next big thing. The only place for SWT is inside Eclipse and their plugins. I dont see any other market.
marc (build 1167)
March 5th, 2004 at 8:16 am
SWT was the last big hope that native widgets will come to Java. I can’t see ugly swing application anymore, especially if you’re working on different platforms than windows. In most cases, you have already the abilities to change the LnF in the native layer. So there is no reason to add another layer in the VM.
March 5th, 2004 at 8:18 am
There is actually one point of Eclipse that I truly like: abilitity to use native fonts. I have this fetish for FixedSys but I can’t use it in IDEA and it pisses me off. >_<
March 5th, 2004 at 10:26 am
Dude – for UI get smart: use VS .Net
March 5th, 2004 at 11:24 am
I agree with boxed about the Fonts in Eclipse, but not so much because of the letter forms but because of the anti-aliasing. Swing text anti-aliasing still sucks ass in 1.4.2.
If the editor text looked half as good in Swing as it does in Eclipse (on Windoze with ClearType or MacOSX) I would switch to Idea or even NetBeans!
March 5th, 2004 at 11:47 am
Hey boxed, you can edit some properties file somewhere to get any native font you want in Java. (I’ve never done it myself, so I could be smoking crack, but I’ve seen people mess with it before.)
March 5th, 2004 at 4:04 pm
Anti aliasing is for pussies.
March 5th, 2004 at 4:06 pm
editor in IDEA looks shitloasd better than eclipse editor on windows and mac :)
March 5th, 2004 at 5:50 pm
Swing seems plenty fast on Windows, but for some reason it’s still much slower than native apps on X Windows. I don’t mind waiting for a menu to draw, but lag in scrolling an edit widget drives me nuts.
Having sub-pixel anti-aliasing (aka ClearType) is pretty important to me, since all my development is on a flat panel screen.
So I will stick with Eclipse for now.
March 5th, 2004 at 8:00 pm
The real reason to use SWT over Swing is not speed, it’s native look and feel. Swing will always be trying to catchup to the latest Windows look and never quite being good enough to fool users. Swing on the Mac however, is plugged into the native windowing system so it looks an behaves properly. SWT would never have been needed if Swing was implemented properly on the other platforms.
I believe we can all thank Lotus for introducing the rediculous l&f requirement on Eclipse. Apparently they want their new workplace client to follow in the grand tradition of Lotus Notes and implement a custom UI that confuses the poor saps unlucky enough to be forced to use it. If you want some really good bile, just ask a Notes user when the last time they had to use killnotes.exe was.
Lotus software is even a joke within IBM. Why anyone would listen to their software suggestions is beyond me.
March 6th, 2004 at 3:31 am
I just ran the new Eclipse build for windows and it’s EXACTLY as close to a native l&f as it has always been: the menus and dialogs look native but the docking windows and tabs are totally non-native-looking. Personally I think this new build is a lot better:
- Keyboard focus is displayed clearly
- You can dock several windows into a tabbed stack
- Tab width is not some bogus fixed value but is actually larger if you have less than 5-10 documents open.
All in all these are improvements over how windows does MDI by miles and bounds.
March 6th, 2004 at 5:10 am
I don’t use Eclipse, but I see a reason for linux people to prefer it over swing based IDEs : the swing implementations that run under x-windows are slow. Yes, I’m sorry, but having to wait a few more milliseconds than usual when waiting for a menu to refresh makes it feel sluggish. If only Linux swing had the responsiveness it has in MacOSX, I’m sure SWT would die quickly.
March 7th, 2004 at 4:06 pm
Want speed? Resuscitate MS J++…
Want portability?(or you’re to lazy to learn APIs for 10 operating systems?) Use Swing…
Want it to to be slow and not portable? Use SWT…
IMHO, I don’t know why there isn’t a good fully-Win32 IDE. Looks like Windows Java coders need to feel the pain of the users.
Linux users don’t have real _native_ graphics, they can choose whatever they suit to hang with a keyboard cable.
March 8th, 2004 at 12:11 pm
Java is slooooowww… especially when it comes to UI. Wherever, there is an equivalent native (i.e. Windows) tool, I always go with the Windows tool. That being said, Intelli-J kicks ass. I’m willing to put up with the slow-po Java in this case cause Intelli-J really rocks. If a native i.e. Windows tool can equal Intelli-J’s features (which I haven’t seen yet) I would switch immediately (I hope the Intelli-J folks come out with a native version of their own product).
This portability crap is just that crap. Why don’t they just create a simple language (and more imporantly simple library) that is standard and enforced (like Java is) – that can be compiled to native code on any machine. C/C++ is somewhat standard but not to the extend it should be. Then, they can still write once, and sell anywhere. Why don’t people just see this – instead of listening to hype – why can’t people just see the difference between what works and what doesn’t.
March 8th, 2004 at 12:35 pm
p.s for those people that continue to believe that Java is not slow any longer are a perpetual optimist and are in self denial. You have fallen for the hype – hook, line and sinker and are now propagandizing the same hype. Repeating, the same thing over and over again is not going to make it true.
March 8th, 2004 at 3:22 pm
I work with ‘jesus’, and he is a little slow, so forgive him. He did a lot of drugs in the past and it shows every now any then.
His illogical argument is proof. “Java is slooooowwww…” he says in one breath, “except for IntelliJ IDEA”.
Isn’t IDEA written not only in Java, but in SWING? Maybe the people writing slow java programs have no skills. Like great grandad always said, It’s not the arrows you should worry about, it’s the Indian.
March 8th, 2004 at 3:49 pm
Diablo, looks like u’ve adjusted ur brain to accomodate Java’s pace. You can’t seem to read (or write for that matter). Your cliche’ is poor, its more like shooting arrows vs. bullets.
p.s i don’t work with you – byaatch. You sound like some retarded out-of-work f*#k-wit.
March 8th, 2004 at 3:56 pm
IntelliJ Idea is plenty fast, asshat. Buy a modern machine and get off the Windows 95, and shut up.
March 8th, 2004 at 4:33 pm
jesus: please look up Qt, it is this platform neutral system you speak of: C++ with cross platform support for GUI, databases etc
March 8th, 2004 at 4:53 pm
I’ve got a 2.5Gz, 1gig machine running Win2000 Scarlet “ass” pimp – quit pimping crap.
March 8th, 2004 at 4:54 pm
He’s lying.. I am looking at his machine right now.
March 8th, 2004 at 6:01 pm
Hey Dildo or whatever the f*%k ur name is … piss off back to the hole u came from.
March 8th, 2004 at 6:09 pm
Qt looks good in theory. I wish that kinda stuff took off rather than the crap SUN spews out. All I’m asking for is stuff that works – that does what its supposed to. I don’t like clicking on a drop down menu half the time and the GC kicks in and my shit goes out to lunch for a minute. I’m just tired off all the hype. Don’t tell me it works, don’t tell me its fast enough – i just want it to do it – i don’t wanna think twice about this shit – i’m trying to use these tools to do something else.
March 8th, 2004 at 6:13 pm
p.s. i think programming in java is simple and fun and pays well – which is why i’m doing it. I guess this hype is good for the economy.
March 8th, 2004 at 7:00 pm
I work with jesus, I originally showed him this site becuase another co-worker of ours got biled.
Jesus used to be a Visual Basic programmer and he whines every day “why can’t Java be more like VB, we should be doing .NET!”.
He’s a MS bitch.
March 8th, 2004 at 8:56 pm
>> Java is sloooow.
Yep. I have never seen a program take so long to crash…
March 9th, 2004 at 2:55 am
What a bunch of retarded fuckwits. Like allways from some point(s) of view Hani is right. Eclipse guys should consider if it’s a real danger what he’s pointing out or not. The alarm is for them this time.
But what a bunch of idiots to transform any UI and Java conversation in a “Swing is slow” “Java is slow” “.NET is fast” and Java sux. You crazy crappy Excel programmers go copy paste columns or whatever. Grinning Shit Eaters.
March 10th, 2004 at 6:46 am
As I am well known as a voice of moderation I would just like to say that Jesus and St.Peter should go away and fuck each other up the ass. However, as much as I would like to say this I can’t because they are obviously the same people. So Jesus/St.Peter just stretch it and fuck yourself. JAVA IS COOL. SWING IS COOL. LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION.
March 10th, 2004 at 12:22 pm
Hmm? Eclipse 3.0M7 still has the ability to look like a native app. I haven’t even seen the new look and feel yet (nor do I have any interest in it). I don’t see what the big deal is.
March 13th, 2004 at 2:21 pm
Swing sucks the donkey’s balls.
It will always be an inferior silly technology.
Emulated Widgets is not a bad thing. If SUN had written then in C/C++ and dumped them with the JDK they would be fine. Combine it with native file Open/Save dialogs etc, and you’re game.
A million apps do it. Lots of music apps, for instance, that need to be both FAST and PORTABLE accross PCs and Macs. For example: Cubase, Logic (when it still had a PC Version), Reason, etc.
On the other hand, emulated Widgets written in Java, using only the minimal native code for points, etc, is the silliest idea ever.
Always was, always will be.
It came from a sinking Smalltalk company, and it also sank Java on the desktop.
People will only use a Java Desktop App if they are:
a) forced by their employers.
b) a java developer himself (IDEs and stuff like that).
Get over it.
P.S And stop perpetrating the “Swing is fast now” myth. It’s slow as shit, and then the GC comes up!
Just open the SwingSet demo in any decent PC. You can see it as each of the buttons for the demos comes up with some delay when they are loaded. Lame. On a 2.5Ghz/512 PC.
March 16th, 2004 at 11:20 am
Eclipse sucks so much elven arse that is possible. I had to start using eclipse after my boss wanted to save money, which means no more IDEA. Will this save money? Don’t think so. I’m thinking about buying IDEA with my own salary to be able to do other things than punching the keyboard for things IDEA could autocomplete.
March 23rd, 2004 at 1:10 pm
Ha ha ha! SWT is better because it is Open Source! My version of Eclipse has ESR as a background window pattern! OpenSource 0wn5 J4v4, b17cH!
May 19th, 2004 at 11:14 pm
I guess there is always wx4j, if you want native widgets and don’t mind using a library with the most shit-awful coding style known to man. :-)
July 17th, 2004 at 7:00 pm
2 minutes for Eclipse to load? Maybe if you had a recent Intel-based PC with a decent amount of RAM instead of your overpriced Mac, it would load faster. Eclipse 3.0 takes less than 5 seconds to load on my machine.
October 19th, 2004 at 12:38 am
Sure you want to keep your java to look native. but why are you using Windows LAF then? ;)
March 12th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
Eclipse – what a bunch of clueless fucks. Every icon in their UI impoverished product seems to be a white 8×8 bitmap (on a grey backgound). Totally unreadable. You get to be really good at counting. Now let me see, the “Search” icon, is that the 12th icon from the left or the 13th?
May 9th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
First thing to do is to get rid of your playstation :-)