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A comment on Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsive desktop app. Parent comment

Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv... by mike_hearn on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @12:08PM (#15393431)
As someone who has written desktop JavaFX apps and web apps, I don't think you know what you're talking about. I can tell because you talked about the web's "fantastic tooling and iteration speed". That's a bit of a giveaway - I'm willing to bet you've never written a JavaFX app in your life.

JavaFX apps work just fine on Linux. Not even fine, they work well. I know because I've written them and tested them on Linux. And not just trivial toy apps: the app I wrote was a full blown peer to peer app with an integrated Bitcoin wallet, a Twitter Bootstrap themed UI, file associations, visual effects like animated Gaussian blurs and an integrated auto-update framework.

There's nothing magic about Electron. It's just another desktop app toolkit. There's no good reason to use it except developer familiarity with HTML. It gives you all the disadvantages of desktop distribution (you have to provide your own auto update framework, get users to download the app) but with none of the advantages like great tooling, great languages, UI builders and so on.

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Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv... by harrygeez on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @01:49PM (#15394413)
It's not about superior tech. Devs don't care. Electron let's developers use all the library and frameworks that they are familiar with, that's what that matters.

I hate Electron apps but I can see why people do it. It's very tempting to be able write desktop apps with the web's best frontend technologies.

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Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv... by oso2k on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @01:25AM (#15398451)
I'd also add that JS + Swing apps on top of Nashorn/Rhino also work really well.
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Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv... by amcca029 on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @12:28PM (#15393617)
> but with none of the advantages like great tooling, great languages, UI builders and so on.

Its funny you say this while using java

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Re:Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsiv... by e12e on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @01:02PM (#15393917)
Using the jvm.

So java 9, Kotlin, Scala or kawa (scheme), abcl (common lisp), clojure (nu lisp:), jython, jruby. While there are compile-to-js languages too (including Kotlin, Scala, clojure :) - there is quite a lot more history around jre/jvm languages for production desktop use.

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