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Four New Eclipse Projects Kicked Off in August


Albireo project seeks to calm turbulent SWT/Swing interactions

By Alex Handy
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August 31, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 3)
The Eclipse Foundation approved four new projects that will expand the capabilities of the platform. The projects, approved this month, include a framework for building new language support into Eclipse, as well as an effort to build an open-source financial management and information platform. But Project Albireo, which seeks to resolve graphical issues that arise from combining Swing and SWT in the same Java applications, is perhaps the most significant of the four.

Created by employees of Genuitec, ILOG, Instantiations and SAS Institute, the Albireo project seeks to expand on the bridge built in Eclipse 3.0 between the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and the Abstract Window Toolkit, upon which Swing is based. Considering that these four companies specialize in business rules management and integrations as well as the Eclipse IDE itself, development issues around SWT and Swing obviously touch many disparate users. Indeed, both ILOG and SAS have already written internal code to help solve some of the initial problems, which will form the basis of this new project.

Gordon Hirsch, principal software developer at SAS, explained: “Anybody who writes a UI toolkit like Swing or SWT just assumes that they're the only UI toolkit in use by a particular application. SWT is based on native controls from the platform. [For example,] in Linux, it will show GTK Linux components. But Swing takes the different approach of trying to be platform-neutral and drawing those components itself. When you put those together, there are bound to be issues.”

Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec, said the Albireo project should move swiftly but pointed out it's unlikely it will ever be complete. “It's designed to migrate a Swing-based Java application into an Eclipse-based RCP application based on SWT and Swing,” said Williams. “Could it ever really end if it's successful? I don't think the answer’s yes. With each new Eclipse, Swing and JDK, there's going to be interaction problems between them. There were different interoperability problems between JDK 5 and JDK 6 because of different Swing implementations. If it's successful, [Albireo] should be ongoing indefinitely. I think this is a much bigger issue than most people may think it is at the moment.”




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