johng Blog

I got my final year project confirmation through from University last week. It’s going to involve doing a lot of work on visualising large tree structures from XML files built off an existing open source Java project. I haven’t writen a single line of Java this year and when I tried any programming I was always concentrating on C++ (W32 and DirectX) and C# (.NET and Mono). So this week I have been doing a few warm up exercises to refresh my memory.

A couple of new things seem to have cropped up in my hiatus away from Java. A lot of people are using IBM’s Eclipse IDE as their core development environment and I can see why. It’s clean, fast and can be adapted to handle pretty much any language you throw at it.

Also I am seeing more applications using SWT rather than Swing as the interface library, Eclipse’s excellent compatibility with it helps massively. In the move over to SWT I do find myself writing less code than with Swing and not scratching my head to much. I remember having to draw out complex diagrams of containers and frames on paper for Swing but with SWT everything just clicks together nicely.

Java may have a future yet. My most used application is writen in Java with SWT - Azureus.