From: MenTaLguY <mental@...>
Date: 2007-11-28T05:12:46+09:00
Subject: Re: "Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)"

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:40:00 +0900, MonkeeSage <MonkeeSage@gmail.com> wrote:
> So that's 5 major toolkits (or 6 if you count pure Swing, but I don't
> know to what extent it implements native widgets; I think it's kind of
> got its own look/feel and themes)...at *least* three of which are
> production quality and support native look and feel across platforms
> (SWT, WxWidgets, GTK).

In terms of look and feel, Swing is at least as "native" as Gtk is; both
use theme engines rather than wrapping actual native widgets.  The main
difference is that GTK normally defaults to a theme emulating the native
look and feel, whereas most distributions of Swing (except the bundled
one on OS X) do not.  It's easy to force Swing to use the native look
and feel though:

 require 'java'
 UIManager = Java.javax.swing.UIManager
 UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName)

...the last line of which you could also write:

 UIManager.look_and_feel = UIManager.system_look_and_feel_class_name

(This IS Ruby, dammit.)

One other advantage of Swing over Gtk is the OS X support -- on OS X,
if the com.apple.macos.useScreenMenuBar runtime property is set to
true your application will use the system menu bar for menus, which is
not (as far as I know) yet possible with Gtk.

One downside to Swing on Windows is that the native Win32 theme lacks
some refinement (mostly odd padding choices), although Java 7 promises
to improve that situation.

-mental