Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

17.3 Porting BudgetPro to SWT395model. This will be your biggest challenge. Go to it. It is a great way to learn.Of course, you can also just download the complete SWT application from thebook Web site. 1517.3.5 Completing the Conversion of the <strong>Application</strong>Completing the conversion of the BudgetPro class does not complete theconversion of the entire application. The AcctDialog class must also be converted.Use the same techniques we described here to convert that class as well.(Or, again, just download the complete SWT application.)17.3.6 Closing ThoughtsOur overall impression is that SWT is more easily comprehended in its entiretythan Swing. It may be easier to learn SWT first, since Swing’s core model ismore complex but more powerful. But SWT and Swing weren’t developed inthat order and Swing is still much more widely used. 16For many GUI applications, our feeling is that it may be faster to write inthe SWT idiom. The problem lies in that SWT’s model has limitations thatSwing’s does not. Notably, SWT GUI elements are in a single rigid tree structure.It is not possible to have a factory class that constructs a GUI elementsuch as a dialog box which is passed up to the caller to be grafted into place ona GUI. Instead, the parent element must be passed in, so all GUI elements belongto the single tree from the moment they are created. Also, by introducingobjects that cannot be garbage-collected, SWT brings into your application thepossibility of a class of bugs that Java otherwise eliminates.Moreover, while converting a Swing application helped give this chaptershape, we would, in general, prefer that an application be designed with its GUItoolkit in mind. You would likely make slightly different design decisionsdepending on which style of the GUI you choose.15. http://www.javalinuxbook.com/16. A gut feel—not based on any real statistics.