Hello,
As I mentioned in
my last post I'm finding the transition from the old AWT to Swing kind of nightmarish. I seem to remember that the AWT in general has been deprecated since around the time I was learning Java at university (ca. 2001) but Swing still has many disadvantages over its older cousin, unless I'm confused:
- It seems to use far more resources than the AWT.
- It is more difficult to program for.
- It requires the viewer to have the 'Java 2' runtime environment installed.
(I had thought that almost everyone with Java had Java 2 these days, but I'm not sure this is true... I heard MS was removing the Jave VM from IE, but I have a copy of IE6 here which seems to have it...?)
On the up-side...
- It gives you more control over how things look.
- It allows for a consistent appearance from platform to platform .
(where the AWT might leave you with unexpected black writing on black backgrounds, for instance, when you try something under Linux or whatever)
- Compilers won't complain about you using old-fashioned code.
...is that it?
Am I missing something? Will I eventually be glad of all the hours spent updating my code to use Swing rather than the AWT? Does anyone have any idea what the statistics are for % of web users with Java <1.2 still installed?
Thanks folks!
hungry