It could be considered strange that IBM would announce that they are releasing a "web-based" Microsoft Office competitor (branded Lotus Workplace) and not emphasize the fact that it is based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and SWT. Are they placating Sun or just trying not to piss them off by bragging about a new platform? It seems like a pretty big loss to SWT, which could use the publicity in its "battle" with Swing for Java GUI toolkit supremecy.

IBM doesn't explicitly mention that it is using RCP and SWT for this ... or did they?

Email client screenshot from EclipseCon 2004 Presentation

Maybe just quietly then. In any case, it's not big news or the emphasis of the article but let's consider points that have been released:

- cross platform (CNET says Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Unix and handhelds)
- offline use

Which is what RCP and SWT can do and web browsers cannot do well.

You could argue that SWT is an immature third party toolkit. SWT development is driven by mostly by Eclipse and some third party plugin developers. The Eclipse project didn't emphasize the fact that stand-alone applications could be made with SWT and subsequently few have been made. The disadvantage is that if a lot of third party developers start using SWT that could take developer resources away from the Eclipse project's specific SWT goals. The Eclipse project may be done expanding SWT and so the priority is to make SWT a more well-rounded library.

I personally ran into problems with SWT when dealing with file associations in AudioMan. SWT was slightly broken but as far as Eclipse was concerned it worked fine and didn't need to be fixed -- no one even noticed the problem in the Navigator view or elsewhere. Only when many many third party applications start using SWT will all of these minor problems, tweaks and Eclipse assumptions be fixed.

So SWT may still have a long period of tweaking left before it's ready to be used as a general application toolkit, especially on platforms other than Windows, which I've read have had performance issues. It seems as though the other non-Windows platform implementations of SWT are always playing catchup and and don't have all of the features of the Windows version of SWT (Sun sees this as an advantage of Swing, which hand draws all of its widgets). For example, in Mac OS X an SWT Table's column headers don't fire events that can be handled (ie. to call a method to sort the values in the column). On Windows this works fine.

So that may be why the IBM puts cold water on the press releases regarding RCP and SWT: they know it's not completely ready for primetime outside of Eclipse (version 3.0 of Eclipse, which contains RCP, isn't due to be officially released until June 28th) and IBM wants to make a few applications of its own (in the Lotus and Rational software divisions) before opening up SWT to the world. It seems like reasonable business strategy but it could slow the adoption of SWT in the short term. It's probably better to wait until it's baked anyway, so they'll let internal people (and early adopters like me) iron out the kinks before really pushing SWT as a general toolkit for applications.