Porting Update

Thought I’d give you guys a little update on how I’m going. Painful.

Pretty much like any new language, the first few days are tough. Me being the “bite off more than I can chew” guy, I tried, and failed, to take on SWT and JFace. In the end I gave up and just went the SWT route, leaving my viewers and content providers to oblivion. Hey, I’m not releasing this as open source, so I don’t have to feel bad about code quality :D. The one benefit of just going with SWT is somewhat quicker dev time, and keeping a fairly similar code style to that of C#’s WinForms.

I’ve gotten rudimentary mod package loading going, with file listings and a file grid with file state highlights. Just implemented a basic image viewer, but I’ll leave that till the end. I’m probably going to try to re-envision how to clearly show the file states of each file and changing the state, as right now it’s quite unclear what each state means for new users. The delete mechanism seems to be overused for something that should be underused, and I might take it out altogether (or at least hard to initiate), as it only useful for deleting META-INF, which right now can be automatically done in the options tab.

But anywho, to summarise, much faster progress once I dropped JFace, and my ETA for 2 weeks still seems on the cards. If you are interested in what to expect in the final port – It will be feature equivalent to the Windows version, plus the added bonus of having native look thanks to SWT.