Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I found a really old article today that details some of the fundamentals of the very popular NetBeans and Eclipse IDE projects (Netbeans being Sun backed and Eclipse being IBM backed). This is significant because of the underlying technology differences. I was struck by just how GOOD Eclipse (and the commercial IBM WSAD) is in the "look and feel" arena. Its "written in Java" but I did not believe it, its too fast, to native looking, to darn good to be swing. Well maybe I am the only one who didnt know this, but Eclipse is not swing, its Java, its GUI, but its SWT or the Standard Widget Toolkit. SWT is not Swing/AWT and that upsets some people. Because its not a java standard, not as "write once run anywhere" and so on. SWT uses JNI to make native calls to native components, thats the trick, thats why it looks so good and works so fast as compared to Swing. SWT can run on any platfom, just any platform for which the SWT toolkit has been ported. Netbeans is of course Swing, and while a *great* project it is not as slick in look and feel as Eclipse. For more on the history of the two popular IDEs and the technical paths, see the linked article.    Will Big Blue eclipse the Java tools market?