Re:The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
by gedy on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @02:13PM
(#30531500)
For its time, Java Swing was a really nice toolkit, and really impressive in its cross platform capabilities. That you could develop a UI directly with code without having to rely on a design file, IDE, or separate tool was very impressive to me.
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Re:The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
by cgrealy on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @03:08PM
(#30532301)
From a dev perspective, absolutely.
From a user perspective, no. Every Swing app I've ever used has been ugly, slow and painful. Now, that might be the fault of the developer, but at some point, you have to wonder if either all Swing devs are terrible or Java UIs are just very difficult to get right.
Re:The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
by shannah78 on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @03:37PM
(#30532747)
My experience with many Swing apps is the same. I think a large part of the problem lay with the development tools. When you create a new Cococa project in Xcode, it generates a full app with all the necessary parts to feel native. You build it, you have a functioning hello world app with your "File" menu, etc...
In Java, when you create a new Swing app, the IDE (by default) just creates an empty main() method for you. You're expected to create your own menus and windows. Trying to make the app "native" requires a significant amount of work.
Re:The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
by bartread on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @02:47PM
(#30531978)
I still rate the layout managers in Swing above anything I've ever experienced with .NET: made it super-easy to build resizeable GUIs compared to, for example, the absolute positioning dumbassery of something like Windows Forms. Flexbox nailed it for the web but it was something like 18 years later before it was consistently implemented across all browsers.