UISpec4J and why I dislike Swing
UISpec4J is library for testing Swing-based Java applications, built on top of JUnit. I’m not Swing’s biggest fan, but this looks pretty useful.
Now, on to why I don’t like Swing. Let’s take a look at a Open File dialog box in a a Swing application (NetBeans 6.0M9):
vs an SWT application (Eclipse 3.2.2):
Because SWT uses the native control, it works exactly like my other Windows applications. I can type something like %HOME%\foo\bar into the File name field and it will open the corresponding directory. Swing doesn’t understand %HOME%. Sure, it could be fixed to understand it, but that’s not the only issue. Another thing that pains me is that interaction with Swing using the keyboard doesn’t feel like other Windows applications. Here I’m thinking about using TAB to skip between elements, typing the first few letters of an item to jump to it or navigating with the arrow keys.
If NetBeans didn’t have such great support for Ruby and Rails, I wouldn’t have any major Swing applications on my machine. (By the way, how about a NetBeans download that only includes the core and the Ruby plugin? That would rock.)