Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 92 posts

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#81

Post by crispinb »

brabel wrote: post #71
crispinb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse a quick aside -- do you know of any good examples of real non-enterprisey apps using JavaFX? Java desktop apps seem almost universally awful, but it doesn't seem like it has to be that way. I'd love to see some counter examples (IntelliJ's IDEs are honourable exceptions, but they're a bit of a special case).

The old LoadUI (load testing tool) was written in JavaFX, you can still see the old screenshots in the documentation: https://www.loadui.org/working-with-loadui/projects.html Also, there's LoadFX (a logging viewer) which was part of the rage post against Electron last week: https://github.com/renatoathaydes/LogFX And Gluon keeps a list of sample apps: http://gluonhq.com/developers/samples/

Cheers. I might have a go at some JavaFX stuff for fun sometime (or more likely TornadoFX with kotlin).

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#82

Post by pjmlp »

erikbye wrote: post #69
crispinb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, looks interesting. Scriptable in javascript too. I always note with irony that professionals expect to pay decent money (Bitwig is $400) for software relevant to their trade; the one exception being software pros.

Visual Studio Enterprise is $2999/year, Pro is $539. Might as well add anywhere from $400 to $1500 for the IncrediBuild license.

That is peanuts compared with what other professionals have to pay for quality tools, specially if they require some kind of regular certifications.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#83

Post by megaman22 »

erikbye wrote: post #68
hota_mazi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason Java became such a big platform for business applications and it isn't because it cared about fashion fads. There's a reason why Java completely failed on the desktop: Swing. > Which do you care more about: it works, or it looks good? Both. I care about both. And you should too. But Swing developers got used to only being able to have one. At most.

Completely failed? JetBrains' IDEs seem awfully popular, and they are all Java and Swing.

Jetbrains IDEs could almost have an NCurses GUI, and they would be worth using. How pretty they are is mostly orthogonal.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#84

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

hota_mazi wrote: post #48
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which do you care more about: it works, or it looks good? There's a reason Java became such a big platform for business applications and it isn't because it cared about fashion fads.

> There's a reason Java became such a big platform for business applications and it isn't because it cared about fashion fads. There's a reason why Java completely failed on the desktop: Swing. > Which do you care more about: it works, or it looks good? Both. I care about both. And you should too. But Swing developers got used to only being able to have one. At most.

> Both. I care about both. And you should too.

Why? What value is looking good? There's value in a well designed responsive UX, but how it looks is completely meaningless to me because it doesn't help me get shit done.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#85

Post by megaman22 »

crispinb wrote: post #80
erikbye wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio Enterprise is $2999/year, Pro is $539. Might as well add anywhere from $400 to $1500 for the IncrediBuild license.

It's really the expectations I was commenting on more than the pricing. I have heard devs on 100k plus whinge about $80 for a professional programmers editor, and rule out IntelliJ IDEs from their consideration because they're not 'free'.

When most "expensive" tools are put in terms of Starbucks lattes, they don't look bad. There's still the actual enterprise-targetted tier, but even up to the full Jetbrains Toolbox subscription, you're looking at what amounts to around a coffee a week.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#86

Post by prophesi »

sandij wrote: post #62
hasenj wrote: post #30

The other day there was a post recommending the use of JavaFX. I would really like to see a non-trivial app built on JavaFX in Kotlin, with the following properties: - Does not look ugly. - Is not composed of _merely_ OEM widgets. But includes custom elements, like one would normally see on websites (and by extension, Electron apps). - Is lightweight and response, not just in terms of CPU and RAM, but in terms of use…

Not sure it meets all 3 requirements, but last time I tried I was rather impressed by the Nightcode Clojure IDE built with JavaFX: https://sekao.net/nightcode/

Oh, I didn't know that was written in JavaFX. I used it a lot when I was first getting into Lisp languages. It's pretty sweet.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#87

Post by _pmf_ »

pjmlp wrote: post #57
justboxing wrote: post #26

Ask HN on Show HN: Why is Swing UI still so Ugly ? 2 Decades since it's introduction in 1997 ( I remember being forced to use it in a trading OMS application in 2002), Swing UI looks frozen in time, ugly as ever.

Because most developers don't bother to read Sun tutorials and books like "Filthy Rich Clients".

"Filthy Rich Client" only shows how to do it, but it's still much, much harder than in QML (even Qt Widgets supported CSS styling) and WPF. I would say by a factor of at least 5 regarding QML and slightly less for WPF.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#88

Post by hota_mazi »

erikbye wrote: post #68
hota_mazi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason Java became such a big platform for business applications and it isn't because it cared about fashion fads. There's a reason why Java completely failed on the desktop: Swing. > Which do you care more about: it works, or it looks good? Both. I care about both. And you should too. But Swing developers got used to only being able to have one. At most.

Completely failed? JetBrains' IDEs seem awfully popular, and they are all Java and Swing.

Can you name another very popular and very good looking Swing application?

Even if you can, you can count them on one hand. Swing was a massive failure, and rightfully so, because Swing/JavaFX apps look, and more importantly, feel, like a broken mess.

In contrast, SWT/JFace apps look a lot more native and feel extremely snappy. Apps build on the Eclipse RCP are in general pretty decent looking and they enable all the native controls and functionalities of the host platform.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#89

Post by hota_mazi »

lmz wrote: post #56
hota_mazi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Sun made the boneheaded decision (and never admitted it was dumb) to go for emulated widget controls instead of native ones. What this means is that they have had to reimplement and imitate the behavior of native controls on all platforms (realistically, Windows only) every time Microsoft came up with a new version. In contrast, IBM took the native approach with SWT / JFace, and the interfaces written with th…

The toolkit based on native widgets existed before Swing. It was called AWT.

AWT isn't native, it uses peers.

The fact that Swing ended up being such a massive failure was in good parts due to the fact that Swing is built on top of AWT.

Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing

#90

Post by pjmlp »

_pmf_ wrote: post #87
pjmlp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most developers don't bother to read Sun tutorials and books like "Filthy Rich Clients".

"Filthy Rich Client" only shows how to do it, but it's still much, much harder than in QML (even Qt Widgets supported CSS styling) and WPF. I would say by a factor of at least 5 regarding QML and slightly less for WPF.

Yes, but it was possible.

Not reading such books, just meant many devs were totally unaware of how to do it.

Post reply on HN