51–60 of 362 posts
Successfully using JavaFX (or OpenJFX as it is now called) in a mission-critical cross-platform app with 50k+ installs. It’s not that bad really. Package size and RAM usage is a bit of an issue, as we bundle it with a jlink’ed (stripped down to what is needed, thanks to Java 9 modules) JDK. Other options like Electron or native Windows/macOS wrappers around a shared core written in C++ were discussed but ultimately d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/lookandfeel/...
Swing's platform look and feel does not get a convincing native experience, as you'll find out the first time you open a JFileChooser on Mac and see a clone of the windows XP file picker with widgets made to look like mac OS widgets circa Snow Leopard.
A univeral GUI (e.g. Swing) was wrong-headed. I don't actually know what happened after people moved away from Swing. But even in the time range TFA discusses, Intellij IDEA, an IDE written in Java, was a success. It has always been multi-platform, and never had worse than acceptable performance in my experience. It has grown into a large suite of products, and I think it is widely considered to be the best IDE, for pretty much any language you can name, by a wide margin.
Java has become the new COBOL -- the language for business applications, which means backend development. But the continuing success and improvement, and broadening of the JetBrains products pretty much demolishes the argument that Java has declined and fallen on the desktop. JetBrains is an existence proof that it is a very capable platform for anyone who chooses to use it there.
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…
Regardless of what its other branches are doing, Oracle managed to do one of the smoothest language takeovers where the (stellar) core team is virtually unchanged, the language became completely open sourced and it underwent tremendous changes which resulted in huge growths after the slowdown at the end of the Sun era.
Note: I am not working at Oracle and never have.
Literally the only obstacle to any language being on the desktop is the lack of someone creating a reliable, well-supported, cross platform, and easily licensed distribution method for that language.
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.
> 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…
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…
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.
> 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…
It's absolutely a psyop cover for the number of webkit-in-a-box projects that don't even bother with the first step. Normalized deviance.