Re:Clojure on the Desktop
by sdegutis on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @10:20AM
(#22737749)
JavaFX seems like it was a good incremental step over Swing but right at a time when the web’s paradigm (the DOM, a brilliant concept) was becoming popular and was a leap beyond Swing. So JavaFX has the same problem as Windows Vista: too little too late. If we had something like the DOM as a new UI kit, it could be a big hit if done right.
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I'm not sure I see any real difference between the DOM and the tree of widgets you can build in Swing. What is it that's so brilliant about the DOM?
The DOM stitches several useful but unrelated concepts together. Besides just being a tree of composable views:
* You can query elements arbitrarily deep using different patterns (depth, class names, ids, tag names, attribute presence/values).
* You can attach event handlers to arbitrarily deep nodes that you just queried, not just the nodes at the level your "controller" is in charge of creating/updating like traditional frameworks.
* Customizing style and behavior is entirely done via properties and composition rather than subclassing like traditional frameworks.
* And more!