RE: Eclipse

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: rob@xxxxxxxxx
>
> Expounding upon David's comments.  Eclipse is a development environment.
> It is not a runtime environment.  (Not to offend Jon), but it would be
> like saying "With SEU and Java can I run this application on multiple
> platforms?"  Well, you could develop Java with SEU but you wouldn't need
> SEU to run it on other computers.

This is not strictly true.  Eclipse includes a component called SWT, or the
Software Widget Toolkit, which is a runtime package that provides an
alternate graphical interface to Java's Swing.  Where Swing tries to look
the same on every platform, SWT tries to make your application look like it
was written for the platform.

In OO terms, SWT is a Facade over the operating system; unlike Swing, SWT
calls many system APIs directly.  There are pros and cons to this approach,
but the most visible effect is that applications written with SWT tend to
look and feel more like native applications, and also seem to function more
crisply than the same application written with Swing.

You can write standalone applications that use the SWT, but you will need to
include the SWT portion of the Eclipse package in order for your programs to
run.

However, since SWT is Open Source and freely available on every platform
that Eclipse is supported, it follows that your applications will also be
available on every platform that Eclipse is supported.

The specific terminology would be that SWT-based applications are supported
wherever SWT is supported, but that's not only redundant, it's a bit
useless, since the SWT project is really a subset of the overall Eclipse
project.  While you can indeed get information specific to SWT (from FAQs to
newsgroups to mailing lists), SWT code is released as part of the Eclipse
project cycle.

Does this make things a little more clear?

Joe