Well the “Eclipse on Swing” discussion is heating up again. I have to admit that I do not see the allure to this. Assuming of course there is some benefit to doing this port, by the time it reaches parity with native SWT/JFace I imagine both Swing and SWT will be fast/flexible enough that no one will need this. This port doesn’t get you away from developing using the design and classes of SWT, all it does is swap out the native peers for Swing-based ones.
This effort originally started a few years ago with Chris Deckers’s SWTSwing project. The project was incredibly ambitious and being done by Chris alone. He made some great progress back in the 2.x days and early 3.x days but then the project got stymied. Recently Chris started the project up again and has been making some fantastic headway with encouragement and interest from the community.
From the discussion on EclipseZone it was pointed out that there is another effort to do this port called EOS. EOS stands for Eclipse On Swing and is being done by both Chris Deckers and Dieter Krachtus. The project is based on the SWTSwing code base with signifigant changes but they are making some impressive headway:
For more screenshots, have a look at their gallery. That is pretty slick seeing Eclipse running with such a crazy LAF applied.
