Will Apple be supporting Eclipse and SWT better in the future?

Marcello pointed out this Apple job posting for a Java Frameworks Engineer in the Eclipse-Mac Google group:

“We are interested in an energetic developer who can master our Java implementation (Java, Obj-C, C & C++) and contribute to making Mac OS X the best environment for Java development.

…You will quickly become a valuable member of the team responsible for the next generation implementation of the HI Frameworks for Java on Mac OS X.

…Responsibilities include portions of the implementation of the MacOS X Java SWT, AWT and Swing APIs…

…Required experience:
We are looking for 1 of these 4 types of people:
…
- has developed core pieces of the Eclipse IDE and has strong knowledge of SWT and its implementation
…”

(emphasis is mine)

As far as I know, the SWT implementation for OS X has been an Eclipse Foundation affair, with Andre leading the way. So it is nice to see Apple starting to adopt SWT as one of its own.

I think they’ve done a great job with the Swing on OS X implementation. I think its one of the better (maybe best) Swing implementations available.

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You’re currently reading “Will Apple be supporting Eclipse and SWT better in the future?,” an entry on Luis de la Rosa

Published:: 1.29.05 / 12am

Category:: Eclipse, Mac OS X, SWT, Swing

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About

My name is Luis de la Rosa and I am an iPhone Consultant helping companies make iPhone apps.

I also develop my own Mac OS X and iPhone apps via my company Happy Apps. The first of these apps is WebnoteHappy, a bookmark manager for Mac OS X which lets you tag your bookmarks and synchronizes with del.icio.us.

I have been making iPhone applications for clients the past year through my company Happy Apps LLC. Through Happy Apps, I have also been developing Mac OS X apps and Ruby Rails apps for the past 3 1/2 years. For over 14 years, I’ve been developing commercial and in-house applications in Smalltalk, Java, Ruby and Objective-C.

I like to share what I’ve learned either from hands-on development or the latest books I’ve read. I used to do it in person when I worked in a cubicle but now I get to share it with everyone via my blog. I don’t really miss the cube. :)

You may have also found me chatting about nothing and everything with other Mac/iPhone programmers at Twitter or you may be within six degrees of separation of me at LinkedIn.

Ryan 1.29.05 / 7am

I wouldn’t put it past Apple. My best guess is that they control their own version of Java so that they can control exactly how AWT and Swing behave on Mac OS X. All of the rest of their Java could behave just like the other *nixes. It would make a lot of sense if they did the same for SWT. Apple joining the Eclipse Foundation would be a huge benefit to both parties.

On the Eclipse side: I’ve used Apple’s dev environment and wasn’t overly impressed when compared with Eclipse. If Apple used Eclipse as a baseline IDE they would get a much better IDE with a larger user base (especially Java) with many available plugins, support for programming languages and feature updates for free from the open source world, which Apple seems to be embracing: Apache, Samba, BSD, etc. Apple could make plugins to support Objective-C in Eclipse.

Why push Java over Objective-C? More people know Java and would be comfortable programming Mac OS X apps with it. More apps means that the whole platform is more valuable. More cross-platform SWT apps means that there are more apps that will work just as well on the Mac as they do on Windows, like Azureus. This leaves less excuses for people to switch to a Mac! Apple people making the Mac SWT port better would be great because there’s definitely a long way to go to match the Windows SWT port. Sure it works, but there are lots of things that aren’t hooked up yet.

If Apple needs Eclipse developers maybe they’ll hire us, eh Luis? ;)

Nicolas Carter 1.31.05 / 2am

For those of us who have tried and possibly failed, we know that developing java code under OS X and Xcode and other present tools, is not a pleasant experience and knowing this let me see if I understand this correctly: The Entire Apple organization is looking for ONE single Developer / Software Eng. to come and in do all that work and turn the entire environment to be hospitable and productive regarding java on OS X? Only ONE WHOLE Software Engineer? Talk about being cheap and expecting the impossible!

Harry Erwin, PhD 1.31.05 / 3am

We use Eclipse as our 3rd year Java IDE, and I run it on my Macintosh machines in preference to the Apple development environment. The students love it, especially the content assist and refactoring support–I’d like to see the same features extended to C++.

Channing Walton 1.31.05 / 7am

Lets hope they work to fix this critical bug: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=67384
It isn’t possible to run Swing/AWT code from within an SWT-based application which is a showstopper for a lot of plugins.

Channing

Luis de la Rosa

Will Apple be supporting Eclipse and SWT better in the future?

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