Groovy and Eclipse SWT

Stupid list manager wants a reply-all...  ;)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Shawn Hartsock <[email protected]>
Date: Jan 4, 2008 10:34 AM
Subject: Re: [Juglist] Groovy and Eclipse SWT
To: Fred Medlin <[email protected]>

I've got two big projects running right now, one is a Groovy/Grails
project the other is Eclipse RCP and I'll admit to finding
Groovy/Grails much easier and faster to learn. Eclipse RCP was like
staring at one of those pictures you have to let your eyes go out of
focus just right to see. After I "got" it though I had invested so
much time in learning it I didn't want to let it go... so I was
wondering if there was a way to make RCP "groovier" one of the
"groovier" things I could see doing is adding "code generators" and
other techniques to cut down on the number of classes you'd have to
write to get a single action done in SWT.

One of my problems with SWT is that I'd use the code generators to get
a "leg up" and lay down some "do nothing but look pretty" code and the
stuff would crash. That's troublesome. The nifty thing with Grails
code generators is that it would "work" sort of and you'd get a
product you could tweak into just the right thing. The RCP and the
Visual Editor in Eclipse don't seem to get along all that well and you
can use the VE to "draw" code but you can't believe for a minute that
it's going to work at all. And then when it breaks you'd better know
your way around SWT... boy howdy.

I would spend a day, build up a mock UI and then the next day tear it
down and rebuild it one code fragment at a time until I saw what
change was causing the crash. Then I would have to scour the 'net to
find if anyone else had the same problem...

As it stands now I'm doing the RCP work in straight Java but maybe in
a year or two... who knows?

On another note does anyone know how to take a Swing, AWT, or other
Java/Groovy application and turn it into a Windows executable or other
native binary? Has anyone played with Java based program installers at
all? I know IBM has some nice installers for the Rational and DB2
products I've installed... what are they and can I use them for my own
projects?

On Jan 4, 2008 10:19 AM, Fred Medlin <[email protected]> wrote:
> I missed the last TriJug, but was wondering about that. Even when I saw
the
> JavaFX demo, I was wondering if a GroovyBuilder construction could
> essentially do the same thing; at least for the syntax, maybe not the
> on-demand JOS stuff.
>
>
>
> On 1/3/08, Shawn Hartsock <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > At the last TriJUG someone mentioned making Eclipse RCP and Groovy
> > work together to create an Agile RCP environment. Well, the Groovy
> > Swing builders get more press so it's no shock we didn't hear about
> > the GroovySWT project:
> >
> > http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GROOVY/GroovySWT
> >
> > So it looks like much work has been done toward making a Groovier
> > Eclipse RCP environment. For what it's worth this stuff's still very
> > beta. I might spend some time with it in March when I have a few
> > minutes... no really, my next free minute is in March... I'm not
> > joking...
> >
> > --
> > /** Shawn.Hartsock http://hartsock.blogspot.com/  //*/
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Juglist mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://trijug.org/mailman/listinfo/juglist_trijug.org
> >
>
>



--
/** Shawn.Hartsock http://hartsock.blogspot.com/  //*/

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