The HTML5 parsing in Java is awesome now! built a desktop app with Bootstrap 3 recently and the logic in Kotlin, fun stuff. Your Swing metal L&F is great :)
Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
41–50 of 92 posts
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#42Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#43Ask 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.
follow up question: why does swing use its own special snowflake design, when it could the OS's native design?
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 that library look and feel infinitely more native and performant than Swing and JavaFX ever did and ever will.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not true, you can get the platform feel easily. I've seen swing do Windows XP through 7 easily. Never tried 10 yet.
I tried using the platform look and feel on macOS, but it gives a number of important elements tiny heights, including comments, making them unreadable. I'm sure there's a fix but I haven't looked into it.
Ah, maybe it's been abandoned for JavaFX as others have pointed out?
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consistent look & feel between platforms.
Which means it sucks and looks weird on all platforms. The story of Swing.
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.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#46The 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…
Disclosure: I am friends with the founder.
Gluon is taking a pretty neat approach with javafx (think reactive native with javafx):
I haven't browsed their repos but if you were to look for anyone promoting jfx it would be these guys.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#47The 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…
I actually did with my company and anyway it was a bad decision.
JavaFX and swing customization is really not easy and not well documented. JavaFX uses custom XML which make no sense to be honest when you want to do nice design.
And it requires custom CSS too.
Additionally, their design are bad(I mean their Java API).
We spend a whole year making an app with it, at the end we decided move away from it, like the rest of the java community if fact that do not really support desktop applications anymore.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which means it sucks and looks weird on all platforms. The story of Swing.
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.
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#49Btw, this project started when my sister and I were eating at Panera and decided it would be fun to each write an HN front-end. Hers was largely a project to learn React, which you can see here: http://coribeecroft.com/hacker-news-frontend/
She's looking for work at the moment if anyone knows of someone who might want to hire a somewhat junior but very smart developer with a good sense of humor. See here for more: http://coribeecroft.com
Re: Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing
#50Very cool! I made a native macOS desktop client . It does use a web view to render the article but the article list, comments, voting, commencing, login interactions are all native . http://mackernews.com