Swing and SWT on Microsoft Windows Vista

Daniel Spiewak put together a short comparison of Swing and SWT on Vista that reflects the current state of these GUI technologies. He used the latest Mustang JDK 6.0 for Swing, and Eclipse as the SWT example.

The screenshots show that SWT is almost indistinguishable from the operating system’s native widgets, and the author confirms it. …I wasn’t able to distinguish between native Vista and Eclipse in terms of its native widgets (obviously not counting CTabFrame et all).

Despite Swing’s obvious shortcomings, it’s too soon to write it off. The Swing team is working hard to make all its widgets look pixel-for-pixel like the native ones. The Swing developers themselves say they know about the anomalies and are working to fix them. See the discussion. Swing vs. SWT on Vista