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The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

jdeploy.substack.com

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Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#101

Post by geraldwhen »

geophile wrote: post #53

This article seems quite off. First, it conflates browser and desktop. Yes, applets died an early and deserved death. That is different from what happened with desktop apps. 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-platfor…

The exception doesn’t prove the rule.

It’s ridiculous that I have to modify Java VM arguments so IntelliJ can use more ram and actually index my projects.

The IDE is great, but Java undoubtedly makes it worse.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#102

Post by marwis »

cosmotic wrote: post #57
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…

Certainly the default L&F is not native looking, nor are any of the popular community L&Fs. Though one can simply set the L&F to the native look and feel with essentially one line of code. The little care I'm referring to is around polish to get beyond the lowest-common-denominator. Regardless, system L&F with Swing is still worlds better than any Electron app, which is now a common technique to build cross platform…

Windows LnF hasn't looked native since WinXP and never felt native. Lots off things are off by few pixels, there are no animations or shadows, no context menus etc.

At least in Electron textboxes have standard context menu and drag and drop.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#103

Post by UltraViolence »

Java's only claim to fame is that's the granddaddy of C#, a far superior language and IMHO one of the greatest computer languages ever created.

In addition, Java was ahead of its time, with mid-1990's computing power not up to the job of letting it run smoothly on lower and mid-tier PC's. It also required, for that time, an egregious amount of RAM memory.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#104

Post by armchairhacker »

bullen wrote: post #99

Many things you don't know are Java are and they are VERY widely used. Java simply wont go away because it works. For serverside it's a nobrainer, but also for client if you have a niche consumer base. Average joes don't understand the overhead of writing native applications and they are paying for it without knowing. Here is my only contribution to the "desktop" Java eco system: http://move.rupy.se/file/logic.html I…

Java is an amazing platform and language. If not Java itself then Kotlin and the JVM. I think it’s underrated and I wish people would bring back web and mobile support so it can be truly cross-platform.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#105

Post by nimish »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #97
tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not because of V8. It's because HTML+CSS (without even any JavaScript) is still the fastest, most effective way to build a compelling and coherent UX/UI for any platform right now. WPF (nee Avalon) was a contender in the mid-2000s, but for some reason Microsoft put it on ice by 2007 leaving the community stuck with incredibly verbose and bloated XAML markup which only made development more tedious than WinForms,…

Now everyone's gone to pseudo-XAML with react JSX.

Plus ca change...

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#106

Post by leftbit »

I've been coding Java since 1.2, mainly UI. 20 years we built a really complex control system visualizing thousands of graphical states on six monitors on a Pentium, quietly ticking away at 20% CPU usage... all in Swing. Which I still find very impressive.

Swing suffered from two central weaknesses: the tutorials provided by Oracle were... often insufficient. And you could pick up some bad habits by following them. And then there were the UI builders where anybody could draw up something mediocre.

Real strength were the lightweight components where you could about change everything in your Look&Feel. Hexagonal radiobuttons? No problem. Want the drop down button of that combobox a bit larger? There you go.

SWT... wouldn't really categorize that as an UI toolkit. SWT is mainly driven by eclipse, not developed independently. All controls commonly used by eclipse run reasonably well. Using anything else, especially cross platform is risky. 2D graphics is especially slow. So it's only a reasonable choice if you want to build something that looks and behaves like eclipse. There's some styling of components via CSS, but it's not complete...

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#107

Post by howinteresting »

geophile wrote: post #53

This article seems quite off. First, it conflates browser and desktop. Yes, applets died an early and deserved death. That is different from what happened with desktop apps. 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-platfor…

JetBrains literally has to ship its own fork of the JRE for things like decent font rendering: https://github.com/JetBrains/JetBrainsRuntime

In its success it shows how badly Java has failed.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#108

Post by mike_hearn »

datavirtue wrote: post #37
bitwize wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't tried AppKit, WinForms, or WPF.

Winforms is dead, as in not cross platform and WPF...the same. WPF is declarative XML as is Xamarin Forms (both slightly different XML oddly). Not fun.

XML is actually pretty good at declaring UI. It's the sort of thing the language was designed for - a UI is a tree of attributed nodes, and that's also what XML gives you.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#110

Post by bruce343434 »

cgrealy wrote: post #67
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.

Minecraft is an application which runs on the desktop... I don't see what you mean.
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