Addendum to : Comparing Swing and SWT

Interesting experiments with SWT and Swing
It is worth taking a look at Jon Lipsky's blog.xesoft.com site he has spent time doing a SWT and Swing user interface for the same application and it worth noting some of his comments. Jon states "I don't really notice much of a different in the responsiveness of both versions of the application." Read his review. Its a good read.

How to Create Frequently Updated JTables That Perform Well
If you are constantly updating your JTable - the following article discusses how to create JTables that perform well. See it here.

Faster Swing Performance
If you are interested in faster Swing performance the following chat High Peformance GUI with the JFC/Swing API might be of interest. Both Scott Violet and Steve Wilson are excellent sources of information on improving Swing performance and more generally on Swing.

Some additional notes on the comparison article :

Internationalization
Internationalization was brought up as a neglected topic and the comment was appropriate. I missed on that one and will include it. (thank you)

Windows XP and GTK Look-and-Feel
Windows XP and GTK look-and-feel was brought up and these will make their way into Swing in 1.4.2 J2SE release.

The Views on Performance
I have had considerable numbers of exchanges that anecdotally have described good performing Swing apps. However, some respondents have taken issue with Swing vs SWT performance claiming that this is only one example. My response is the following - this isn't an issue of Java religion - Java and Swing have become fast enough and in some cases faster than native executables - everyone (including Microsoft) is moving over to byte codes of some ilk and fast platform JIT compilers. What this exercise is trying to show you is that that it isn't clear that SWT is faster. And when it is - you are exchanging a minor speed advantage for cross-platform compatibility, pluggable look-and-feels, internationalization, advanced Java 2D APIs, automatic memory management, and other features.

If these features are unimportant then the question becomes - why not simply use a native Linux/Unix/Windows toolkit instead of SWT ?

My point is that these features are extremely important to most Java developers.

I am very appreciative of the comments made so far - they have been very constructive.

Thanks.

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