Ship Happens! Insights From the Eclipse SWT Community @ JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is the GUI toolkit used by Eclipse. The same folks that worked on the Common Widget (CW) library for IBM/Smalltalk developed it, this time for Java. Now, it's maintained as part of the Eclipse Platform project and distributed under an open source license, the Eclipse Public License (EPL). One key design point of SWT is that it uses native functionality on each operating system and, at the same time, presents a common, portable API. Joe Winchester, Desktop Java Editor for Java Developer's Journal, asked Steve Northover (SWT Team Lead) recently whether he'd be happy to answer some questions about SWT and, after talking to his colleagues and a few developers, here is the result.

Reader Feedback : Page 1 of 1

Vince Marco commented on the 11 Mar 2007

> Carolyn: You have to get an interface exactly right the first time,
> because you can't change it without breaking binary compatibility.

Exactly how is this different with classes? API is an exact contract, whether it is done through interface or class (abstract or concrete). As a developer I can either depend upon the API or I can't. API management is difficult, period. And yet it must be done or we have to throw out everything for a whole new framework every so often. The difference is that with interfaces I can separate out dependence on how to do something (the API) from the implemented behavior.

Good discussion, BTW.

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