Eclipse with SWT vs Dolphin

I am trying to figure out if Dolphin smalltalk is better for UI
applications in Windows then Java with Eclipse and SWT.

Here are areas I cannot find a deterministic answer.

1. I like Java Web Start idea.  Java web start simplifies application
installation and product updates.  Will I have to implement my own
installation application as well as update procedure in Dolphin?

2. I've seen comments that smalltalk programmers are about 3 times
faster then java programmers.  This is great.  I know that these
comments where made several years ago.  Although there are no huge
changes in languages, but there are good IDE environments which
improve java productivity.  Eclipse usability is very high and that
improves productivity.  Coding productivity in Eclipse is partially
improved  because of the automatic completion.  Do you think that
productivity in Dolphin is still higher in comparison with development
in Eclipse?

What keeps me to consider Dolphin is smaller amount of code to write,
pure OO nature of the language, blocks, smaller footprint, easier
reflection (if there is a need) and somewhat better set of core
classes.

Many of the features seem to be more or less equally implemented in
both cases: refactoring, debugging, smalltalk workspace functionality.

Sergei Gnezdov wrote:

> I am trying to figure out if Dolphin smalltalk is better for UI
> applications in Windows then Java with Eclipse and SWT.

I use Eclipse for Java, and am *considering* SWT for Java apps (when I next
have to write one) but haven't actually tried programming against it yet.

> 1. I like Java Web Start idea.  Java web start simplifies application
> installation and product updates.  Will I have to implement my own
> installation application as well as update procedure in Dolphin?

There's no direct equivalent of WebStart.  You can package apps in the
"traditional" way (with an installer and so on), or just as a zip file to
expand somewhere in "program files".

Actually, Dolphin comes with all the bits needed to create your own equivalent
of WebStart -- all you need is a way to load separately-compiled code into a
running application, and Dolphin has that.  I've considered putting something
together a few times, but have never quite needed it.

> Eclipse usability is very high and that improves productivity.

Personal opinion: Eclipse is the best of the current Java IDEs. It is *just
barely usable* compared with Dolphin.  To be fair, I am more used to Dolphin
than I am to Eclipse, and I've also added some quite sophisticated extensions
to the Dolphin environment, but I haven't done the same for Eclipse (although
that, in part, is because it seems to be a lot harder to extend Eclipse than
Dolphin -- in itself a reflection on the comparative virtues of the two
environments).

Another personal opinion: the "productivity" of Java IDEs tends to be about
minimising the amount of typing you have to do.  Fair enough, it's a worthwhile
aim.  But it is really optimising the wrong thing: for me, *typing* is not the
bottleneck (and I'm not a particularly fast typist either), *thinking* is the
bottleneck.  So, no there's way that, say, keyboard accelerators in the IDE are
going to make much difference my productivity.   If -- as I find -- it takes
more thought to arrive at some desired end-point in Java than it does in
Smalltalk then it's going to take me longer to write a given program in Java
whatever the relative qualities of the IDEs.  YMMV.

> Many of the features seem to be more or less equally implemented in
> both cases: refactoring, debugging, smalltalk workspace functionality.

Comparing check-lists won't tell you much about the *real* differences.  A
recent post of mine,
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3e81ce94%240%2459849%2465c69314@mercu
ry.nildram.net , was a long rant about how I see the differences between the
Smalltalk environment and a Java IDE; you may find it helpful.  There again,
maybe not ;-)

One side-effect of the different models, is that (in most cases) where Dolphin
and Eclipse have comparable features, they work *better* (more quickly and/or
smoothly and/or consistently) in Dolphin.

The only exception that I can think of is that IntelliSense (AutoComplete,
whatever you want to call it) works a lot better with a declarative type-system
like Java's.  OTOH it'd need a *very* good IntelliSense implementation to make
up for the downside of *having* to declare types in the first place...

I also find that I waste a lot of time with housekeeping tasks in Java/Eclipse,
tasks have no equivalent in Smalltalk.  No matter how good Eclipse's support
for these is, it can never reduce the overhead to zero.

Of course, there's more to the choice than the quality of the IDE, or even just
basic productivity.  That's why I use both...

    -- chris

Damn.  I wrote:

> I also find that I waste a lot of time with housekeeping tasks in
> Java/Eclipse, tasks have no equivalent in Smalltalk.

which should read:

    tasks *that* have  no equivalent in Smalltalk.

    -- chris