Difference between revisions of "SWT/Plan3.5"

Revision as of 22:43, 27 August 2008

Introduction

This page contains blue sky thinking about the kind of things we would like to see in SWT's immediate future. This is a place to collect ideas - it does not represent a commitment to implement the ideas.

Cocoa Port

• Port SWT to the Macintosh cocoa widget toolkit. This involves improving the prototype code [1] to be product quality. There is lots of work to do here from rewriting the (PI) Platform Interface generator used to model Objective-C and the cocoa class library in Java, then calling that Java code to implement SWT.

Bidi

• Investigate mechanisms to support BIDI better on the Macintosh where mirroring is not supported (nor expected) for the base widgets, such as trees and tables, yet button and field ordering needs to be right-to-left.
• Improve BIDI support in SWT in single line edit fields.

Theme Drawing API

• Provide an API to draw operating system themed controls and parts of controls.

Native Controls

• Add more native controls to SWT such as Header and HeaderItem, native tool bar support for the Macintosh and other widgets.
• Investigate custom draw for controls other than tables and trees.

Accessibility

• Provide hooks for third party non-native assisitive technologies such as IAccessible2 to integrate into SWT.

Performance

• Investigate performance improvements on all platforms.
• Investigate lightweight monitoring and tracing technologies [2] to find slow code and problem areas.

E4

• Run SWT in a Browser
  • complete Flex and Dojo port, implement Silverlight port
  • investigate and/or implement a JCL (Java Class Library) for the browser
  • investigate API to resolve desktop and web (Display.run(), async image loading ...)
  • investigate API to animate layouts
  • investigate API for async dialogs

• Declarative UI

• CSS stying

• Animation and Effects API

See also

• E4 Main Page