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Matt Stephens
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 Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2004 9:27 am Post subject: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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You might be interested in this article at SoftwareReality.com:
http://www.softwarereality.com/soapbox/swing.jsp
Swing, although it has its moments of greatness, has always been just
barely good enough for the job; but it's capable of so much more.
Meanwhile, the competitors are getting hungry...
This article proposes an 11-point plan to keep Swing at the top of the
heap. The overriding theme: make Swing more like Flash.
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Karsten Lentzsch
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2004 11:14 am Post subject: Re: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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Matt Stephens wrote:
| Quote: | This article proposes an 11-point plan to keep Swing at the top of the
heap. The overriding theme: make Swing more like Flash.
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Although I agree with some points, I can't
see how these points are backed by facts.
E.g. "11. Make Anti-Aliased Fonts Easier to Use".
Anti-Aliased fonts can decrease the legibility
and readability significantly if not done well.
A typical 8pt Tahoma won't benefit from AA on
displays with a resolution below 100dpi unless
you use subpixel AA.
On the other hand, Swing can use AA efficiently
if the platform supports it, just see the OS X
and the Swing Aqua look&feel.
"10. More Optimisation Needed"
In the past Swing significantly lagged behind
other toolkits when it comes to speed. Anyway,
if you avoid typical performance pitfalls,
you can provide Swing UIs now that compete
with native user interfaces. Give users a version
of JDiskReport and ask whether they feel it's slow.
"9. Improve the Layout Managers"
I provide an advanced layout manager and layout
system that overcomes most of the problems
developers experience with the JRE layout managers.
It's free, open source and has been designed
to meet the needs of developers. In my layout
courses I observed what works well and what
stiffles the creativity. It seems that the
FormLayout can help a lot: save time and get
consistent high-fidelity multi-platform design.
"3. Create A Vector Look & Feel"
I don't quite understand why developers or
end users should care about implementation
details of the look&feel. From my perspective,
a l&f shall increase the usability; often
a high legibility helps, as well as readability,
consistency and elegance.
Best regards,
Karsten Lentzsch
JGoodies :: Java User Interface Design
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Carsten Zerbst
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2004 7:47 am Post subject: Re: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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Am Thu, 04 Mar 2004 01:27:28 -0800 schrieb Matt Stephens:
| Quote: | You might be interested in this article at SoftwareReality.com:
http://www.softwarereality.com/soapbox/swing.jsp
Swing, although it has its moments of greatness, has always been just
barely good enough for the job; but it's capable of so much more.
Meanwhile, the competitors are getting hungry...
|
The current state of swing is IHMO not the main obstacle in
creating desktop applications. Comparing the situation
with Gnome or KDE , not with GTk or QT, one feels the
lack in desktop integration.
An java application which is well integrated into the desktop
(Gnome/KDE/Windows/OS X) needs access to the default application
like browser, viewer or editor for MS Word, PDF, JPEG ....
If Sun would provide a new implementation of the activation framework
which is not only server but also desktop oriented, these problems are
gone.
The other thing needed for better desktop integration is a better
Drag'n Drop support. The last thing I'd like to have is better
printing support, which uses the capabilities of the desktop
(Gnome/KDE/Windows/OS X).
Just my 2c, Carsten
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Karsten Lentzsch
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2004 10:33 am Post subject: Re: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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Carsten Zerbst wrote:
| Quote: | The current state of swing is IHMO not the main obstacle in
creating desktop applications. [...]
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I second that. From my perspective, one can build
professional Swing deskop applications now. Some
3rd party libs complement Swing to make this easier.
Regarding the desktop integration, Thorsten Laux of Sun
talked about Sun's plans to extend it at the J1 2003.
And the drag-and-drop support is one of the issues
one cannot work around easily, so that should be fixed.
It seems to me that the main obstacle Swing developers
face is the high learning curve, the lack of tool support,
and the lack of good examples and tutorials. I will
address the latter by opening my Swing examples
and writing about Swing.
Karsten
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Andrew Thompson
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2004 2:16 pm Post subject: Re: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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On Fri, 05 Mar 2004 11:33:01 +0100, Karsten Lentzsch wrote:
| Quote: | Carsten Zerbst wrote:
The current state of swing is IHMO not the main obstacle in
creating desktop applications. [...]
I second that.
...
It seems to me that the main obstacle Swing developers
face is the high learning curve, the lack of tool support,
and the lack of good examples and tutorials. I will
address the latter by opening my Swing examples
and writing about Swing.
|
Excellent! I'll look forward to the
Swing tuts.. In what form will you make
them Karsten? [ I ask because I detest
PDF's with a vengence, and was wonderring
if you might mean some web page based
writings.. ]
--
Andrew Thompson
* http://www.PhySci.org/ Open-source software suite
* http://www.PhySci.org/codes/ Web & IT Help
* http://www.1point1C.org/ Science & Technology
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Karsten Lentzsch
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Mar 05, 2004 2:48 pm Post subject: Re: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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Andrew Thompson wrote:
| Quote: | Excellent! I'll look forward to the
Swing tuts.. In what form will you make
them Karsten? [ I ask because I detest
PDF's with a vengence, and was wonderring
if you might mean some web page based
writings.. ]
|
The JavaDesktop.org articles will be in HTML.
And I'll provide copies as PDF on the JGoodies site.
Before I write articles, I will finish a last
piece of software: a demo for my Binding library.
Otherwise I may die in Email as happened last year
when I open sourced the JGoodies Looks and Forms.
I plan to write about appearance, layout/design,
data binding techniques, data validation, and
general Swing tips how to tie an app together.
There are already German articles regarding
appearance and layout in the Java Magazin.
See this diagram http://tinyurl.com/2gvmr
(replace Swing Suite by "A Swing app foundation")
I will write first about the purple Basics layer.
The JGoodies libraries address problems, almost
every Swing developer faces. I won't write about
my personal solutions, but about the problems
they address and the concepts behind them.
All articles shall be backed by open source
applications such as the Forms Demo or now
the Validation Demo. See
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/validationdemo/
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/formsdemo/
I better stop now and work on the binding demo ;)
Have a nice weekend,
Karsten
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Robert
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2004 7:30 pm Post subject: Re: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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Karsten Lentzsch wrote:
| Quote: | Andrew Thompson wrote:
Excellent! I'll look forward to the
Swing tuts.. In what form will you make
them Karsten? [ I ask because I detest
PDF's with a vengence, and was wonderring if you might mean some web
page based
writings.. ]
The JavaDesktop.org articles will be in HTML.
And I'll provide copies as PDF on the JGoodies site.
Before I write articles, I will finish a last
piece of software: a demo for my Binding library.
Otherwise I may die in Email as happened last year
when I open sourced the JGoodies Looks and Forms.
I plan to write about appearance, layout/design,
data binding techniques, data validation, and
general Swing tips how to tie an app together.
There are already German articles regarding
appearance and layout in the Java Magazin.
See this diagram http://tinyurl.com/2gvmr
(replace Swing Suite by "A Swing app foundation")
I will write first about the purple Basics layer.
The JGoodies libraries address problems, almost
every Swing developer faces. I won't write about
my personal solutions, but about the problems
they address and the concepts behind them.
All articles shall be backed by open source
applications such as the Forms Demo or now
the Validation Demo. See
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/validationdemo/
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/formsdemo/
I better stop now and work on the binding demo ;)
Have a nice weekend,
Karsten
As a newbie to Java and SWING, I would love tutorials showing how to use |
your looks/forms packages. That would be very cool and I look forward
to your writings.
Bob
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Karsten Lentzsch
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2004 10:15 am Post subject: Re: Swing Survival Guide (what Swing needs to survive) |
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Robert wrote:
| Quote: | As a newbie to Java and SWING, I would love tutorials showing how to use
your looks/forms packages. That would be very cool and I look forward
to your writings.
|
Thanks for your feedback.
Actually, the Looks and Forms come with an HTML
documentation, user's guide, and tutorial sources.
The Looks Demo and Forms Demo have been built from
the tutorial sources that ship with the distributions.
In addition, the JavaOne 2003 presentation about
advanced layout issues is available online, as well
as a video of the talk itself. I slightly improved
version of the layout presentation and other Swing
stuff is available online at
http://www.jgoodies.com/articles/
Best regards,
Karsten
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