Has anyone got an example of aerith style swing mixed with GUI maintainability of SWT editing?

Question

My boss loves VB (we work in a Java shop) because he thinks it's easy to learn and maintain. We want to replace some of the VB with java equivalents using the Eclipse SWT editor, because we think it is almost as easy to maintain. To sell this, we'd like to use an aerith style L&F.

Can anyone provide an example of an SWT application still being able to edit the GUI in eclipse, but having the Aerith L&F?

Answer 1

Like Heath Borders said, SWT doesn't support L&Fs, so you have to use Swing for that. Aerith however does not base on a look and feel, but on custom painting on the components with a lot of gradients.
If you are looking for a Swing GUI Editor that is (nearly) as easy to use as VB, try the Matisse GUI Builder in NetBeans. There is also a version for Eclipse, but it is shipped with the commercial MyEclipse. If you want to learn more about writing apps with cool a cool GUI, have a look at the Filthy Rich Clients book by Chet Haase and Romain Guy.
If this does not convince your boss, try to resize the VB GUI and then resize the Swing GUI. ;-) And I would say a VB is really not very good to maintain in the long run...

Answer 2

SWT doesn't support look & feels. You can get different L&F's by altering your OS native L&F. The only exception is to using the eclipse forms toolkit. It still has the OS native feel, but strives for a web-browser-like look. It does this mostly by setting everything to SWT.FLAT, and using white backgrounds on everything. Occassionally, they have to manually draw outlines around controls that don't natively support it. If you're looking for custom L&F's that will appear across platforms, you really want Swing.