Stephen Holder

Gregg is right, emulating this in an SWT text area is not hard. The most straightforward approach is to listen for button presses, and when they occur simply update a flag indicating whether or not to capitalize. Then you can use a VerifyListener on the Text widget to capitalize text as it is entered, if the flag is turned on.

And, as a happy coincidence, capitalizing text with a VerifyListener is the very example that starts off Chapter 5 of our book .

I'm not sure I understand your question... do you mean that clicking the button in your UI should activate the Caps Lock key on your keyboard? Off the top of my head, I'm not sure that is possible. If you can explain your situation & requirements a bit more clearly, I'll try to help you out.

Well, we actually had a third author (Laurent) do Appendix B for us, and I don't have any real experience with OLE/ActiveX/Windows development, so I'm not going to be able to get into too much detail here. But at a high level, the appendix contains a brief overview of COM, and a discussion of how to embed COM objects into your SWT application. It then discusses how to have your SWT application expose COM interfaces of its own, for use by other apps.

Does that answer your question?

I really don't have much to add to Ali's answer, he covered most of the relevant points. We have tried to approach the Swing vs. SWT issue as "SWT is different from Swing in these ways", as opposed to "SWT is better than Swing". Only you know the requirements for your project, we're hoping to give you enough information to make an informed decision.

Personally, out of the frameworks you listed, I've developed applications using Swing, SWT/JFace, and played around with XUL some. This is actually the first I've heard of Spring's RCP; I'll have to check it out.

Honestly, leaving Spring RCP aside simply because I'm not familiar enough with it, each of the others has enough major backing and significant projects behind them that I would be very surprised to see them go away any time soon. From a longevity standpoint, I'd imagine you'd be fine using any of them, so a decision would need to be made based on the other requirements of your particular project.

Actually, the book is written to be "IDE agnostic" for the most part. We provide instructions for getting you up and running in Eclipse, but also for setting up a project using just the command line and Ant. Appendix D (the discussion of GEF) does pretty much assume you are using Eclipse, but for the rest of the book you should be fine using whatever your favorite IDE happens to be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did primarily use Eclipse while developing the examples, and I believe Matt did also.

Thanks Thomas, we really appreciate hearing that. We put a lot of time and effort into writing the book, its great to know that people are finding it useful.

Hi J.B.-

I actually don't have a whole lot to add, Matt's recommendations are probably the best place to look in terms of getting ideas.

As for a comparison with Swing, to be honest I've never really come up with a good strategy for unit testing UI components, whether Swing/SWT/Web based/whatever. Maybe I should check out your book . I'd guess that you'll have approximately the same issues in running tests against SWT components as you would against Swing. Using JFace and the Viewer framework does make testing some things fairly straightforward, because you can test LabelProviders, Sorters, Filters, ContentProviders etc. on their own, but there still isn't any good way that I know of to test the actual widgets that eventually get displayed to the user.

Hi Vinicius-

Our goal was to make the book accessible to pretty much any java programmer, regardless of their experience with any specific UI toolkit, so it does not assume that you have any prior SWT/JFace knowledge. It does not require any experience with Swing or AWT, either, though we do occasionally draw comparisons between JFace and Swing. These are always in addition to our main discussion of a topic, though, so if you do not have Swing experience it will not be a problem.

-Steve Holder

Thanks Dirk. Like Matt said, we're really looking forward to your questions, hopefully this should be an interesting week.