Customer Reviews

Professional Java Native Interfaces with SWT/JFace (Programmer to Programmer)

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Unfortunately, the phrase "Java Native Interfaces" is in large letters and "with SWT/JFace" are in a much smaller font. It should have been the other way around because the complex subject of JNI is barely touched on here. I cannot comment on the SWT/JFace coverage because that was not my object, but if you are looking for a book that will tell you how to put C++ and Java code together, this one probably won't help.

Very little information is available about using JFace. This book, like many others, gives a good beginning, but does not go beyond the beginner tutorials available from IBM and other places. The big advantage of this book over learning from free tutorials on the Web is that a consistent explanation of all the basics of JFace are here in one place. By flipping back and forth, I constructed a better overview in my mind than I had from working individual tutorials.

This book is not enough by itself to get beyond a beginner level. None of the books I have found discuss how to use the event model when you have more than a few objects to juggle, or how to communicate data between the a GUI and the other parts of a large application. By reading this book and SWT/JFace in Action: GUI Design with Eclipse 3.0 (In Action series) side by side, I got a better picture of the JFace event model than from either book alone. I noticed that both books say something about the Model-View-Controller pattern, but do not fully explain how that differs from what is provided in JFace, SWT, and related Java frameworks. JFace contains many other aspects, such as its Help system, that this book does not cover. The pages in the index of my copy were misordered. I notice the publisher, Wrox, says this book is printed on demand.

In my opinion both this and SWT/JFace in Action: GUI Design with Eclipse 3.0 (In Action series) are superior to the third easy-to-find book on JFace, The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFACE.

One thing you gotta love about the Java crowd is their naming philosophy. Now there is SWT, the Standard Widget Toolkit.

This book covers SWT as used in conjunction with Eclipse. It first compares SWT with other user interface packages, then it goes on to detail how to use the widgets to facilitate the writing of GUI's. It's a tutorial style book that completely covers Version 3.0 of SWT/JFace in a clear and informative manner.

This book is timely, clear and well written. It will quickly get the reader up to speed on these packages.