I’m working on a Java IDE… It’s nice… called Umlaide in sourceforge.org but I’m not sure if I should use Swing.
I’m very good with swing but this project is bigger than I have attempted before. I heard there are alternatives out there… like the gui for Eclipse. Does anyone know the details? Which one is best for large apps?
Thanks for any help
The best? There will be no answer.
Swing has been proven to be suitable for really big apps. See Together, NetBeans, JBuilder, IDEA or the app we do at work. But SWT as well - Eclipse is the example.
Swing is the first order standard now. Anything else needs more things to run than a JRE. Although for the complex things, they need much more jars anyway.
If you feel comfortable with Swing, use it.
[quote] If you feel comfortable with Swing, use it
[/quote]
Agreed. Started a thread about swing slowness, and my actual conclusion is that the finding it fast or useful or bloated or well done or anything is just a matter of taste.
The thing with swing is: Swing apps doesn’t look like native apps regardless on the platform. People don’t like this!
I have written a Lotus Sametime client for my company, it’s 100% Java with Swing UI. It has nice improvement compared with the original Sametime client form Lotus and it even runs fine on Mac and Linux. But: Lots of Mac users asked about the client, but the dont like it, cause it does not look like a MacOS9/MacOSX application. Same I heared from Windows and Linux users. “Nice features, but the UI sux” 
I tried SWT as experiment. SWT seems to be somewhat faster as Swing and I am getting good feedback so far.