August 23rd, 2006
EoS: Eclipse on Swing
In what has to be one of the most cleverly named projects of all time, EoS (named after Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn) promises to bring Eclipse to Sun’s Swing platform.
EoS is the result of a collaboration between Dieter Krachtus and SWTSwing developer Chris Deckers. A download is available, but it’s currently more a proof of concept than a usable system. "The most important point in my opinion was to show, that EoS is possible and will be usable," writes Dieter. "Bugs can be fixed."
With EoS, it should be possible to make Eclipse (or perhaps more importantly, Eclipse RCP applications) run on a standard JRE with no additional native code other than what’s already supplied with Java. It also opens up the possibility of non-native look-and-feels, such as everyone’s favorite, Napkin:
If you haven’t been following the whole story of Swing vs. SWT, and Sun vs. Eclipse, this whimsical history from Dieter should clear things up for you:
In ancient times, a GUI toolkit named Swing was crafted to outshine all its predecessors, as it was a child of Sun. However, in its infancy, like every child, Swing did crawl slowly on all fours, and few believed in it’s promised future strength.
To make things worse - Swing’s father Java, king and notorious philanderer hits the scene of our drama, and spawns another child: SWT, unlike his half-brother Swing, is born with native speed and beauty, sometimes compared with his half-sister AWT.
Bitter sadness took hold of Sun as her only son and heir’s bright future was eclipsed by the - in her eyes - illegitimate child.
Many wars were fought over the question of the righteous successor of GUI shire. As a result, the kingdom grew weak, it’s noblemen in constant quarrel and it’s borders unguarded, when hostile neighbors came to pillage.
Today, as we speak, EoS brings a new "dawn" to end this war and unite the fallen out half-brothers in friendship.
Follow us and together we provide a happy ending to this story as only celluloid can deliver.
So far there has been no official response from either Sun or Eclipse. See the EoS site for more screenshots.
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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