Comments on: Swing is drowning

By: gary

gary — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:57:03 +0000

Why do people think java swing is complex? I rather think these people who called themselves “developers/programmers” are simply the laziest people in the work force. Give me some api and drag and drop… Add some getters and setters. oh yeah. now pay me the big $$!! Ppl learn something worth while. remember computer science you learned from school? you want complexity and poor oo design, go with MFC. The only issue I see swing is a bit overly flexible hence the added complexity. Learn the event dispatch thread, that all you need. nothing complicated. People are simply too lazy to try to understand the technology. Technology? There’s nothing new in swing. Remember X/Motif? of course not.

Why are so many server programmers? I call them getters and setters. Haha, design pattern… what a joke. try using it in swing. Read the holub pattern book. J2EE my a**. Yeah, the container will do everything for you… Any moron can do server code. XML/EJB/JMS…. tell me something new. All recycled technologies with bloated overhead from the old days.

I am not against JEE. I am against the people who think they know better. sigh

By: miranda

miranda — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:17:11 +0000

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By: Fred S

Fred S — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:14:06 +0000

“Complexity stems from Java’s power” – NOT. There is no intrinsic need for such astounding GUI complexity in making simple programs.

By: Tim McClarren

Tim McClarren — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:44:46 +0000

“Perhaps it’s because I have little experience in GUI frameworks outside of Swing, but I find it incredibly intuitive and powerful.”

I think that says it all. Everyone I know who has not spent time in any other application framework finds Swing to be intuitive and powerful. Swing was pretty awful from the start and never got better (it doesn’t even deliver events to the application in a consistent order across platforms… wasn’t that the whole promise of write-once, run-everywhere?)

Maybe they’ve fixed that since I last used it 5 years ago. I kinda doubt it.

I’d probably pick Qt over anything else if I wanted a solid application framework and cared about XP issues. It’s much better designed than Swing.

By: Jonathan Watmough

Jonathan Watmough — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:36:32 +0000

I’ve come to JVM/Swing through the Clojure language, and I love the combination of Swing and NetBeans for quickly building really nice GUIs. It seems like the hardware has finally caught up with the software, and I have built some UIs that run across all platforms Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and on 1.5 and 1.6 that work just great.

I’m not sure this is really possible on any other platform. For example, Winforms in Mono does not yet work on OS X. I haven’t found a cross platform language that has a platform-consistent Gtk binding … etc etc

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:40:30 +0000

One project I’ve been kicking around is a weird kind of richtext editor/browser…long story short, the best way to implement it is to build a custom text storage class. Swing allows that. I don’t know of any other gui toolkit that does.

Tragically, I also want multimedia editing for the same project, and for that Java provides bupkis. So I have to go to another platform, and put more work into the text system, because I definitely can’t do the media from scratch.

By: Stephane Grenier

Stephane Grenier — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:47:25 +0000

AS Faria described, I think Swing is maturing. It’s a great framework to build desktop application in. Once you get your head around it it’s very intuitive. And you can see it’s where many of the web frameworks such as JSF are heading to.

And I also agree, if done right, most Swing apps don’t look like Java apps at all. They have that much power. If you look at our app (http://www.LandlordMax.com), unless you looked at install folder, you’d have no idea it’s a Swing based application!

By: Faria

Faria — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:24:10 +0000

I would have nearly believe the tagline “Swing is drowning”, if I hadn’t been involved with the development of an end-user application, with an enormous amount of user interface, in the last year, and hadn’t seen in being developed very smoothly.
When we show the application that we have build, people usually don’t believe it’s Java (you have to show them the task manager so that they see it’s a Java process). And it worked with only *very few bugs to fix* on Windows, Mac and GTK.

Strangely, 2 years ago, I would have agreed that Swing was drowning; now I don’t anymore. Part of if comes that I now believe what I see, but also, I think that Swing has simply matured: less bugs, less strange behaviors on different platforms…

Rather than “swing is drowning”, I think we currently can saw “swing is thriving”.

Now, it doesn’t mean that there can’t be other great enviroments: Eclipse RCP, WinForm… WinForm is probably best actually, a mix of simplicity, and beauty. But if you want to do complex stuff, and crossplatform, Swing is *still* thriving.

By: Trey

Trey — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:58:41 +0000

Spring RCP is alive and well. I see new commits coming in on a regular basis and have been using it for many different projects. All it lacks is good documentation.
I highly recommend the Spring Rich Client Project for building well-structured Swing apps.

By: Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:11:17 +0000

I am currently working on a Swing application that is being used at close to 2000 retail locations by the company I work for. It was in development for over three years. One thing Swing doesn’t come with is a framework that you can use to create large enterprise applications so we ended up creating one ourselves. Anyway, I prefer programming in Swing to any other GUI toolkit (SWT, MFC) and to web programming.