OSNews

What's missing from Swing?

Well for a start, how about a date picker in the core distribution (without resorting to SwingX or other libraries). How about controls for each and every java.sql.Type, so you could at least to easy mapping from databases to simple forms ? (the type that are common in enterprise environments).

Don't get me wrong, Swing is still my preferred 'filthy rich client' SDK, since I've spent long enough to know how to use it's power, but you'd have to be blind to miss its many flaws.

That said, WinForms has its own problems, I remember going insane with an early version trying to get table (DataGrid, IIRC) columns to be aligned correctly. What WinForms did it did very well, but what it didn't involved a lot of effort to rectify (and some things couldn't be rectified). With Swing the average effort is higher, but I've always found it easier to get it to do exactly what you'd like (once you figure out how to do it). Which toolkit to choose is just a tradeoff (power vs. ease-of-use), like everything else in engineering.

Back on topic. While both Eclipse and NetBeans have their strengths I think that with release 6.0 NetBeans is starting to edge ahead in ease-of-use. The only real bugger with NetBeans compared to Eclipse is working with projects that were created outside of NetBeans Possible of course, just a bit of a pain to debug single files - this is something Eclipse is good at (but then Eclipse can't do anything as simple as print syntax highlighted source code even on the relatively limited range of platforms it supports).

Check out the nifty NetBeans plugins coming out. The GWT integration is very good, and I like the OpenGL plugin as well (syntax highlighting for GLSL shaders, w00t!).