Dave Thomson was one of the founding employees of Object Technology International (OTI), a company IBM acquired in 1996 and which has become the foundation for IBM's Ottawa Lab and many of the technologies underlying IBM's tool products. Prior to OTI's integration with IBM Dave served as VP Development at OTI. Dave led the teams that delivered the underlying IDE technology in many of IBM's award-winning products including: VisualAge for Smalltalk, VisualAge for Java, and the Eclipse platform. Dave was the principal architect behind the transition of IBM's internal workbench development effort into the open source project we now know as Eclipse. Dave is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and is responsible for IBM's Eclipse Development team, and serves as a director on the board of the Eclipse Foundation.
In his editorial 'Swing Is Swinging Java out of the Desktop' (JDJ, Vol. 7, issue 10) Alan Williamson lamented the current state of Swing and AWT for building competitive desktop applications. One alternative he mentioned is a technology called SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) that was dev...
