SWT - Technical Deep Dive

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SWT : Technical Deep Dive
“Eclipse Day Bangalore 2014”
Niraj Modi
Eclipse SWT Committer @ IBM Software Labs
niraj.modi@in.ibm.com
Arun Kumar Thondapu
Eclipse SWT Co-Lead @ IBM Software Labs
arunkumar.thondapu@in.ibm.com

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Agenda
 10 features you may not know!
 What have we been doing?
 Useful Tools in the SWT world…
 How to “Contribute” to SWT?
 What’s next?

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10 features you may not
know!
 SWT as a stand-alone application
 independent download (swt.jar is ~6MB)
 SWT as a Java Web Start application
 www.eclipse.org/swt/jws/controlexample.jnlp
 Display#syncExec,Display#asyncExe
c
 special access methods to allow non-UI threads to
perform operations on objects belonging to the UI-thread
 SWT implements a single threaded UI model
called apartment threading

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know!
 Browser widget: Embeds native renderers based
on creation style and native OS
 Windows – Trident (IE), Gecko
(mozilla/XULRunner) and WebKit
 Mac OS X – WebKit, Gecko
 Linux – WebKitGTK, Gecko

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know!
 OLE/ActiveX support
 OLE Documents, such as Word, Excel or
PowerPoint can be embedded into SWT
applications (using COM)
 ActiveX Controls (can be used to embed IE)
 Accessibility APIs for making applications
accessible to Assistive Technology products
on all major platforms

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know!
 Custom widgets
 StyledText
 CCombo
 CLabel
 CTabFolder
 SashForm

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know!
 OpenGL support
 OpenGL is a vendor-neutral, multi-platform standard for
creating high-performance 2D and 3D graphics.
 Touch and gesture support
 If your hardware supports it, you can listen for touches or
gestures on SWT controls. Four standard gestures are
supported: two-finger panning, rotation, magnification, and
swipe (three fingers on Mac OS X, flicks on Windows).
 You can also listen for 'raw' touches.

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know!
 Custom draw for Table and Tree Items
 allows clients to create items with custom appearances
 custom drawing is done on a per-cell basis
 SWT.MeasureItem: allows a client to specify the dimensions
of a cell's content
 SWT.EraseItem: allows a client to custom draw a cell's
background and/or selection, and to influence whether the cell's
foreground should be drawn
 SWT.PaintItem: allows a client to custom draw or augment a
cell's foreground and/or focus rectangle

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know!
Custom draw examples

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know!
 Virtual Tables/Trees
 virtual Tables and Trees allow developers to
quickly create Tables and Trees with large
amounts of data and populate them efficiently.
 items are created on an on-demand basis.
 reduces computational effort and memory
footprint, preserves UI responsiveness for large
data sets.

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What have we been doing?
 CSS styling support for widgets (partial)
 Added support for Mozilla/XULRunner 24.x
and 64-bit support on Windows
 Experimental support for WebKit2 on Linux is
available
 Default Browser renderer setting has been
introduced

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 Various BiDi text and widget orientation
related enhancements
 SWT#isLoadable () API
 UI timing API
 SWT.PreEvent and SWT.PostEvent which are
sent before and after all events and async
runnables.

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 Porting SWT to GTK+ 3.x
 GTK+ 3.x is API and binary incompatible
with GTK+ 2.x
 A number of functions, and in some cases,
entire widgets have been deprecated
 Uses GIO for launching applications
 Uses cairo for all drawing

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Useful Tools in the SWT
world…
 Sleak
 Sleak is a simple tool that monitors the creation
and disposal of SWT graphics resources.
 SWT Spy
 SWT Spy plug-in for Eclipse is a simple tool that
prints out information about the widget under the
cursor.
 style, layout and parent information

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Useful Tools in the SWT
world…
 SWTBot
 UI/functional testing tool for testing SWT,
Eclipse and GEF based applications.
 integrates with Eclipse PDE, Eclipse
headless testing framework, Ant and Tycho
 WindowBuilder
 WYSIWYG visual GUI designer

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How to contribute to SWT:
 SWT dev environment setup
 Channels to contribute
 Creating a fix patch for any of the bugzilla
request

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SWT dev environment setup:
 Instructions to setup SWT code
http://eclipse.org/swt/git.php
 SWT Code snippets/Examples
http://eclipse.org/swt/snippets/
 SWT sources Git repositories:
http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/platform/eclipse.platform.swt.git
http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/platform/eclipse.platform.swt.binaries.git

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SWT dev environment setup:

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Channels to contribute
 Report any SWT
bug/enhancement@Bugzilla:
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/bugs.php
 Contribute to existing issue
 Analyze the issue & come up with code snippet to
reproduce it(if missing) or point to existing snippet
 Identify problem area in the SWT code if any
 Participate in bug discussion
 Try to come up with a fix
 Participate in SWT community discussions:
http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/f/100/

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Creating a fix patch for any of
the Bugzilla request:
 There are two ways to create a fix patch:
 A less recommended (but straight forward) way is to attach an
standard Eclipse patch to the Bugzilla bug:

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Creating a fix patch for any of
the Bugzilla request:
 Preferred way is a Gerrit patch with review support:
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/Gerrit/article.html

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What’s next?
 Interoperability with JavaFX
 Continue adding support for newer
Browser runtimes
 Enhance support for Retina and other
high-resolution displays
 Wayland - a display server protocol that
is intended to replace the X Window
System

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Interoperability with JavaFX?

SWT - Technical Deep Dive

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