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by sgift 1803 days ago
The developer experience of web technologies is after all this time still far worse than all the desktop libs I've tried. It is even worse than Swing (for those who don't know: That's Javas GUI technology. From the 90s). Add to that the horrible RAM usage, the general jankiness and ... thanks, but no thanks.
1 comments
gedy 1803 days ago
> It is even worse than Swing (for those who don't know: That's Javas GUI technology. From the 90s).

As someone who loved Swing and used to hate JavaScript, that's really nonsense if you actually want to be a UI developer (and not just some side afterthought).

State management and the custom capabilities when you need them are amazing. I wasted a lot of my time writing tons of Swing code. Sorry, but the modern front end experience is much more enjoyable and productive. If you want "native widgets" I get the complaint, but most platforms seem to be less interested in consistent experiences these days.

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kaba0 1803 days ago
> State management and the custom capabilities when you need them are amazing

JS devs just rediscovered MVC with some added immutability and that’s all. Hardly more productive. Also, I don’t see your point on custom capabilities - please add a slight modification to the date picker widget. Oh, you have to reimplement the whole thing with some insane number of divs, while you can trivially override certain parts of it in most desktop libs.

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publicola1990 1803 days ago
Dependency management is simple for Swing. In can mostly be assumed that it is available and works. How many dependencies will an Electron /Webstack based app have?
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pjmlp 1803 days ago
Plus there are frameworks like JGoodies and everyone should look at Filthy Rich Clients book.

The biggest issue with Swing is just bad defaults. Except for NeWS, Sun wasn't really into the desktop business.

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criddell 1803 days ago
I really like JetBrains IDEs and I think they are based on Swing.

Although I haven't used it for more than a decade, I still have some fondness for Java. I like Workflowy but am not crazy about it being in the browser. I contemplated writing my own outliner and Java + Swing is one combination I'm thinking about.

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