The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFACE | 
| Authors: Robert Harris, Rob Warner
Publisher: Apress
Category: Book
List Price: $49.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 159906
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 684
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7 x 1.7
ISBN: 1590593251
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
UPC: 689253152515
EAN: 9781590593257
Publication Date: June 21, 2004
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Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! 1st Edition. 2004 Paperback.
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Product Description
The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace is indeed definitive and proved to be a nearly perfect choice for starting my journey inside Eclipse's much hyped GUI toolkit(s). — Lasse Koskela, JavaRanch Bartender Need to build stand-alone Java applications? The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace will help you build them from the ground up. The book first runs down the Java GUI toolkit history. Then the book explains why SWT is superior and provides extensive examples of building applications with SWT. You'll come to understand the entire class hierarchy of SWT, and you'll learn to use all components in the toolkit with Java code. Furthermore, the book describes JFace, an additional abstraction layer built on SWT. Demonstrations of building JFace applications are also included and reinforced with thorough explanations and example code. These applications can be used as GUI plug-ins for Eclipse, and they're compatible with the new Eclipse 3.0 application development framework.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 exactly what you will need for working with SWT/JFACE September 24, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
if you are looking for something to walk you through widget by widget..holding your hand this is your book . Excellent reference and very clear structure.
Good to have by your desk when you need to look up something and dont like reading javadocs from the source ...
 Great text, great complete examples, minor flaws August 17, 2005
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
Having being treated to a text called Windows Forms Programming for C# by Chris Sells in late 2004, and considering that's pretty much the closest book in spirit in terms of covering a high-level Windowing API and is relatively well-known, I'll go right ahead and use that as a metric:
I am surprised to find no coverage of SWT and Java 1.5's threading abilities. I wanted to see a coverage of how to handle long-running worker threads that must call delegates that run on the UI-thread (like a web services caller threaad telling the gui-thread to update the progress update bar to show 75% completed). I wanted to see coverage on how to send events information back and forth between GUI thread and the worker threads. It's one of my favorite chapter in Sells' book because without it it is very difficult to write a responsive app. This is criticial in this day and age with the decent amount of web services and distributed computing being used in Intranets and Internets. If Harris and Warner are willing to write an extra chapter on this very topic, I would be greatly in their debt. We are all waiting for this chapter! I guess some of you will say, wait for Doug Lea's next book, but I trust Harris/Warner to get to the point faster and better--and stay on topic (I am not sure if Doug Lea would bother with SWT). I am hoping there's an answer to this, because I need to use this asap.
There are some other surprises I find distasteful: data access and binding of data recordsets to grids are no where to be found.
These are the main reasons why this book gets a four star. Because people like me are spoiled.
Anyway, back to the book review:
Real-world cross-platform development is a tough subject. If you ask most people, they'll relunctantly say the best way to go about it is to write platform neutral c++ model/controller code and write the view code in Qt or Gtk/MFC or WinForms/Carbon or Cocoa. Nasty.
It goes without saying most small development shops simply can't budget serious competence in one, let alone three major GUI frameworks. This is not counting all the trouble you have to go through to evaluate count-less so-so [for one reason or another] libraries (wxWidget, MainWin, Swing, OpenStep API, Flash, Mozilla) just to arrive at the point where you can clearly say aha, I really want MFC/Carbon/Qt after all.
[And let's not even get into strictly system programming libraries, for which there are several dozens on the sourceforge galaxy alone.]. So for light work, where you aren't trying to please 500 million users right away (Internet Explorer, Outlook Express) or even 200,000--you really want something like Java 1.5+SWT:
> One productive language.
> One well-supported effort to map a common gui api to all major windowing systems while preserving native looks.
> A quick build that produces three executables. One for RedHat Linux. One for Mac OS X. One for Windows NT 5+.
Which is why I am really happy Sun and IBM is trying so hard to make this option happen. I build small softwares for a relatively small audience. With IBM's contribution of SWT, all we need now is a good text that cover it thoroughly--from the perspective of developers--not the library writers. The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace gives you just that.
At times, I can see how some of the other reviewers might say, "It's just table listings rehashing documentations", and if you compare this book to Chris Sells' book you may wonder the same thing--but I think it's still an excellent try and the authors add something to the docs. I'll point out a few examples:
* In the "Selecting Files for Open and Save" they went out of their way to write the correct version of how to handle over-writing an existing file. Hey, just imagine if the authors said nothing... ;-)
* Throughout the book they document what the behavior will be if you did something undocumented: they'll mention when you shouldn't subclass SWT; they post questions to the eclipse group to clarify some of the bad decisions that had to be made and they tell us what we should do about it.
* They explore some patterns they expect real world programmers will likely try (like Decorations, which is like a half-implementation of MDI), and warn you ahead of time what you can expect to find or even whether you should use it.
The best part about them adding a bit of details is that you'll likely dig through the MSDN with Sell's book (which is not a bad thing), but you'll probably have everything at your finger-tips with Harris/Warner--so is it a bit wordy? Is it too referency? Maybe--see for yourself. :-)
This is a great book, and I wouldn't hesitate recommending it. It's a key to a world of cheaper better cross-platform development--walk--no run to your bookstore and get it!
 Not bad...but not great, either April 27, 2005
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Much of the beginning chapters in SWT are simply API listings - WORTHLESS! I've got those online...don't need them in a book, especially since they are not as complete as the JavaDocs. Otherwise, not bad. I'm looking for better...
Great Book, leaves wanting more... April 19, 2005
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is overall an excellent introduction to SWT and JFace. After working with the technology for over 2 years I can say that it would have been a great help to have this book back then. The book's layout was well thought out. My only wish is that they put out a follow up book covering some of the more advanced topics like Events, Embedding Swing components, Packaging and Distributing SWT/JFace applications (including using JWS), using Native code. Plus, even though is Java covering some of the things that can be done with ActiveX controls would be a plus.
 Good on Visual Design, Virtually Zilch on Event Handling December 21, 2004
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
If your main question is how to place widgets on your screens, then this book is excellent. But if, however, you would like those widgets to actually trigger events, then this book is a damned disappointment. They have a general chapter on events but for widget after widget, their examples show you how to place the widget on the page but not how to get its events. You can write code to trigger events but try to do something useful with those events and you will be greatly disappointed.
Also, if you were hoping for some guidance or examples on how to use the 'asyncExec()' or 'syncExec()' methods, you will be disappointed. There is nothing. So, if you need anything beyond the basics, don't waste your money.
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