There are several ways to package a Java/SWT application on Mac OS X. However, if you want your application to look and feel like a native Mac OS X application, you will want to opt for creating an application bundle. Read more to learn how to bundle your Java/SWT application.
Bundling Java/SWT Applications for Mac OS X
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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SWT gives you too basic controls, no models to handle multiple widgets and many other shortcomings.
I only see it worth the extra effort when you have slow computers and Swing is not suitable.
I worked for a year with SWT and I had to code myself all the models for the widgets (like TableModel, NumberText, etc.) deal. Dealing with that on swing is way easier.
http://macbuild.sourceforge.net/
But at least your fonts don’t look like dogcrap and there is a higher-level framework called JFaces that you can use with SWT.
Did you explore JFace? JFace handles most of these issues for you.
swing apps in os x are actually first class citizens unlike they are in linux and windows. i’m not so sure what the point then is to use something like SWT specifically for OS X. add to the fact that in tiger (both os x tiger and java 1.5 tiger) swing apps will be opengl accelerated, the performance issues would be almost totally gone.
On Mac OS X Swing components do proxy to native components
transparently, whereas SWT uses the old Carbon frameworks instead of the newer Cocoa. I wouldn’t use SWT if I needed a Java GUI on the MAC.
Not on OS X it ain’t. Swing fonts on OS X look sweet.
Swing on Mac OSX is actually very cool, and Apple has fixed a lot of the Swing issues. … but, if you are writing an application to run on multiple platforms, SWT is sometimes a more viable choice because of the very close native look and feel on each platform. People say “Well, look and feel doesn’t matter much” … well, I hate to say it, but in business it really does.