> from my personal experience dealing with web development in the present, both from the application user's side as well as development side is such a pain. It is a complete bloatware package, slow and ugly, RAM hungry, disk I/O hungry.
I think that fits!
On the enterprise side, I've seen a lot of hot garbage. But I've also seen a lot of good stuff.
DBVisualizer, while not having the prettiest interface, is a pretty fast and functional application built on Java.
Looks like a pretty handy tool IMO, and Java beats Electron for me, so not sure what the issue is.
It's a terrible Java GUI.
No offense to the developer, I'm sure the technical parts are great, and the GUI probably makes more sense on other OSes (macOS which I'm running it on is specifically listed as not yet supported).
It launches in full screen(?!), extremely basic UI consistency is utterly broken (like option-arrow keys to jump between words in text fields), the "new connection" dialog scrolls SIDEWAYS on a 4K display, it's just insane. 20 years in and Java still does not produce cross-platform GUIs without major, major work. At least with Electron, text fields work as expected.
Hopefully by adding macOS support they'll fix these things but usually with Java apps "adding macOS support" just means adding a .app wrapper and app signing around the .jar.
I know cross-platform is cool on HN at the moment, but honestly if it doesn't have a native macOS interface, I'll pass.
Having a different user interface paradigm for each program reminds me of the old Windows days, and is one of the biggest benefits of switching to a Mac. Perhaps it's because I use a dozen or more different programs during the day, but I'm so much more productive with a consistent user experience.
Obviously, there are exceptions. VS Codium is one. But the benefits of such an exception have to really outweigh the loss in productivity.
As far as Java GUIs go, I've seen far worse than this. It's fine to me.
I use WinSCP daily. It is very functional, but beautiful is not a word I'd use to describe it.
I mostly agree, but I also work with enterprise software products that have legacy code bases with baggage that is over 10 years old, so there is still a lot of Java software that sucks. We're talking about applications that take minutes to just load and display a window on otherwise fast hardware. And in some cases, the entire purpose of the application is to basically slap a GUI around an XML configuration file.