I've worked professionally on a fairly large SWT-based project. This project was started when Swing was slow and ugly so SWT probably seemed fresh. Also, having a native L&F was important in those days.
We had tons of problems and they where almost never easy to fix. Layouting in SWT is hard. Custom widgets are hard. SWT did not play nice with Swing/AWT on Linux so it would crash if you needed to use both. I remember I spent a lot of time getting automated testing working reliably (on mac) but eventually just gave up.
Things might have improved since I worked on this 7 years ago but I would not bet on it. SWT is basically a support library for Eclipse and therefore Eclipse is more or less the sole driver for any development.
I would rather just use Swing. Compared to when SWT was started Swing has evolved a lot and IMO the rationale for going with SWT does not exist anymore.
We had tons of problems and they where almost never easy to fix. Layouting in SWT is hard. Custom widgets are hard. SWT did not play nice with Swing/AWT on Linux so it would crash if you needed to use both. I remember I spent a lot of time getting automated testing working reliably (on mac) but eventually just gave up.
Things might have improved since I worked on this 7 years ago but I would not bet on it. SWT is basically a support library for Eclipse and therefore Eclipse is more or less the sole driver for any development.
I would rather just use Swing. Compared to when SWT was started Swing has evolved a lot and IMO the rationale for going with SWT does not exist anymore.