[Mono-list] Windows forms

[Martin Bravenboer]

> The Eclipse toolkit is not a general purpose toolkit.  It will require a
> lot of work before it is such a thing.  It is a toolkit used to
> implement a development environment.

SWT is independent of Eclipse, although IBM isn't promoting it in this 
way. You can run and develop Java GUIs with the SWT or JFace library 
without having Eclipse installed. It requires a native implementation 
for each platform, but this work has already been done by the Eclipse 
project for several platforms. Therefore it wouldn't be a lot of work to 
support SWT in Mono on a lot of platforms.

JFace is also quite interesting. This is the model-based GUI library. 
Erich Gamma has been working on this project, so I suppose the design is 
nice ;) . SWT is something like a more attractive and extensive AWT, 
JFace is the model-based view on such a GUI library. I think this 
seperation is a good thing (Swing is completely model-based an therefore 
doesn't offer this seperation).

The Mono project should really look at SWT and JFace, because the native 
implementation for various platforms is already available. SWT GUIs are 
fast and look nice. Because of the native implementation they really 
look and feel like native GUIs.

Martin Bravenboer.