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The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

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Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#61

Post by gordaco »

jahlove wrote: post #43

Some of the new LookAndFeels for Swing are really slick. Take a look, for instance, at FlatLaf: https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

The ability to switch LookAndFeels is one of my favourite features of Swing. Lately I've found myself using the Motif one a lot for my tiny personal projects, although copy&paste doesn't seem to work on its text boxes and that's very annoying. I usually make it so I can configure it an change it on the fly. Trying all the possibilities is kind of satisfying.

Java gets a lot of hate but it's a language I really like. The only real issue I had with it is its memory consumption. As a developer, it still has some warts like the absence of actual generics (autoboxing is an ugly hack), but when I compare it with other languages' warts, they are usually uglier. Although my preferred usage of Java is mostly reduced to mathematical or algorithmic stuff, with little to no external libraries, and it certainly doesn't include Spring or any other annotation-heavy framework.

As a user I also definitely prefer Java to Electron and most modern frameworks. Then again I hate most modern design trends...

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#62

Post by geodel »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #23
geodel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not admin, but kind of manage non-prod servers. One problem with Java is that a lot of things are half-done. If it totally relied on OS it would have worked, or if Java solution was thorough it would have worked. SSL management and Java app monitoring with tools like jconsole comes to mind. But others might have different annoyances. It is working on one server and then broke on a newly built server apparently d…

I don’t think this is Java itself. Many Java apps are not designed with admin UX in mind. Those that have good UX usually don’t land on admin’s plate anyway and are managed by devs or devops.

jconsole is not user developed Java app, it is built-in tool comes with JDK distribution. And problem was not with UI it was that UI wouldn't come up because of some obscure network setting, with no useful error displayed back to user to fix issue.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#63

Post by adrian_b »

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.

I do not know whether the Java GUIs that I encounter from time to time are made with Swing or with other frameworks.

What I know is that since the beginning of Java and until now, on every occasion when I use for the first time some program and I am surprised that its GUI is ugly, slow and impossible to customize, then, without exception, I always discover that the GUI is written in Java.

Since around 8 years I use only 4k monitors. While on Windows I have encountered some programs which had problems on high-resolution screens, on Linux I never had any problems, except with all professional programs written in Java, which, unlike the native GUI applications, do not honor any system configurations and they do not seem aware of which is the monitor dpi, to adjust their GUI. Moreover, for some reason the programmers who write such Java programs are almost always morons who do not provide any means for changing the fonts which are used by the GUI.

Just a few months ago, I have still encountered some expensive professional programs, which used a Java GUI installer. The Java GUI installer crashed on any computer which used monitors with 10-bit color components. When investigating the problem the conclusion was that it is a well-known Java bug that had not been solved for some years and which causes such Java GUI installers to work only on low-quality monitors with 8-bit color components.

So much for the supposed benefit of Java being able to run anywhere.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#64

Post by janaagaard »

> That said, we’re roughly circling around the year 2005, which, arguably was a turning point for Java on the desktop. Before 2005, there are lots of questions and answers in online forums about Java desktop technologies like Swing, Cocoa bridge, etc…. After 2005, there really isn’t much. What happened in the years leading up to 2005, or perhaps in 2005 specifically that caused this blackout? Where did all of the Java desktop developers go? Likely many of them moved to the server-side, and the ones who stayed on the client likely shifted their attention to the web, or to native development.

Could it be the release of Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005) showing that you could actually make really great apps written in HTML and JavaScript? For me, these two webapps were turning points in how the web was looked at. As I remember it, things didn't really take off until frameworks like AngularJS were released around 2010.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#65

Post by jimbob45 »

nray wrote: post #58
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…

The JRE security horrorshow might have started before the Oracle aquisition, and we wanted rid of java on the desktop for the same reason we wanted rid of flash. Apple used to advertise that only Windows suffered from viruses until their own unpatched JRE was exploited widely. Oracle contributed by making updates burdensome to download, and now unavailable without a support agreement, but what stopped java GUI apps f…

I think you might be onto something. MS' C#, which is a near 1:1 copy of Java and what it aims to accomplish, has never suffered the same issues as Java's JRE. You have to wonder if that's because MS gets away with baking CLR updates quietly into Windows whereas JRE updates are more difficult to deploy.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#66

Post by perbu »

antihero wrote: post #59

I think Java had a bad reputation on desktop for a long time. Every application I remember using back in the day was extremely sluggish, felt like a skinwalker with regards to UI, and hogged memory.

FWIW; I use the Jetbrains suite every day and I don't have a problem with it at all. Compared to, say, VS Code, I think it is pretty snappy stuff.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#67

Post by cgrealy »

shiado wrote: post #29

On the other hand Minecraft is the best-selling PC video game of all time and it was originally written in Java and the Java client is the definitive experience of the game.

not really a desktop app though, is it?

And Minecraft is also a notable outlier. Outside of mobile, there are very few games written in java on PC or consoles.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#68

Post by kaba0 »

makach wrote: post #47

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 i…

Which IDE do you mean?

Also, fortunately java really doesn’t have to be written in EnterpriseTM way, hell, the language designers actually agree on this one not making properties and the like native, but instead choosing records.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#69

Post by grandinj »

The company I work for is happily delivering Java Swing desktop apps every day.

Works great, easy to debug, tons of open-source components to plug in when we need, sufficiently performant, thoroughly battle tested.

And these are medium update rate apps, not games, but not static forms either.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#70

Post by toolslive »

A Steve Jobs quote: "We want to bring Java back to the desktop in a really big way. I'm here today to personally tell you we are working hard to make Mac the best Java delivery vehicle on the planet. The biggest thing we are doing is we are going to bundle Java 2 SE into every single copy of Mac OS X the upcoming Macintosh operating system that we ship later on this year."

Apparently, he changed his mind around OSX 10.5 and just removed it.

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