The decline and fall of Java on the desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#41

Post by speedgoose » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #19

cosmotic wrote: post #4

Java Swing still lets you make native-looking-and-feeling apps (with some care). I don't know of any new GUI frameworks that let you do the same. I consider this a killer-feature of the framework. It's also very fast, backed by OpenGL and DirectX. It also ships with source code and isn't declarative, so it's trivial to step into as a means to debug why your code isn't working.

Do you mean specifically for Java? The Qt framework widgets look pretty dang native on my Mac.

Qt applications that try to look native are a bit weird for me. They are like a counterfeit product. I prefer an Electron app with a non native look that looks good.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#42

Post by speedgoose » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

victor106 wrote: post #28

jjoonathan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> native-looking-and-feeling apps Who are you kidding? > (with some care) No. Even if you were to give it more care than required to rewrite the GUI natively in each major platform, you still wouldn't be close. Look, I get it, there are plenty of applications where a bit of clunk in the GUI is beneath other things on the priority list. That's fine. But the number of java devs who think clobbering together a few nativ…

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/lookandfeel/...

It was not impressive when this documentation was written, but it's for sure not impressive today.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#43

Post by jahlove » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

Some of the new LookAndFeels for Swing are really slick. Take a look, for instance, at FlatLaf:

https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#44

Post by manuelabeledo » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

wiz21c wrote: post #27

manuelabeledo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working on a successful Java shop with thousands of deployments per month. Curious about what's so hard about Java.

having to run several Java runtime versions on the same computer. I developped some years ago and that was an issue: some applications require 1.7, others 1.8, with some funny security specifics (I think it was not possible to set the security level for certificate on a per-version basis)

What’s so hard about that? I genuinely don’t understand. I run applications on different JREs concurrently, and I yet have to find any issues with it.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#45

Post by kactus » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

I still run across Java apps pretty often, but they've all been third-party tools for Eve Online. I begrudgingly installed the Eclipse JRE for them.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#46

Post by tmp_anon_22 » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #33

IMO the real decline was Oracle. Java used to be a slowly rising language and set of platforms with benevolent oversight from SUN and at least the outlook that it was one of a few things you might want to add after Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS (Macintosh or later OSX). Then Oracle bought SUN and everyone knew all of the good would eventually be strangled out by the lawyers and models that sought to dominate and…

Really it was the Chrome v8 engine paving the way for electron and Single Page Applications.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#47

Post by makach » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:46 PM UTC

I used to love Java. Although I think they ruined it with the concept of "Enterprise Java" which only complicating how they were delivering the software. Many good things came out of this work that has been ported to many other frameworks (although, not with the enterprise branding)

Java is not slow, I use a couple of high quality desktop applications and these will most likely have a future as long as the language is developed. These are not slow apps. Bad developers make bad software regardless of language.

One of the main things that I always struggled with was the IDE of java. Buggy, slow and overly complicated. I saddens me profoundly that java lost its "je ne sais quoi"

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#48

Post by wanderer_ » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:46 PM UTC

High school AP Computer Science classes are still teaching Java today. I suppose many of the skills it develops are applicable to other languages, but this still needs to change.

However... Minecraft, anyone?

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#49

Post by sosodev » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:47 PM UTC

Lately I've been working on improving the performance of an open-source HD graphics plugin for the 21 year old Java game oldschool runescape. I have to say it's completely amazing what this ancient Java code has achieved. Reflection allowed the community to build the client they wanted without needing the company to open source the vanilla client and it runs natively on Windows, Linux, and Mac (Intel and M1). It's also ridiculously fast considering how many layers of abstraction we have piled on top of one another. The only thing that sucks is the way parallelism/concurrency works. It's clunky, race conditions are common and hard to manage, there's a ton of overhead, etc.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#50

Post by bartread » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 7:47 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #17

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.

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.