[shannah78]

"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."

Agreed. Also, the IDEs would typically give you too much rope - enough for a novice to hang himself. When you create a new project with Xcode, you get a default project with all of the essentials for a native app. The menus, a window, an "About" window. Etc. In most java IDEs you get an empty main() method. Making an app that feels like a first-class citizen requires a lot of work and attention to detail.

[leftbit]

Oh, yes, the details are critical.

Once inherited a 2D graphic editor... so slow it was totally useless. After tinkering a bit I noticed coordinates were sometimes 'long', sometimes 'Long'... gazillions of automatic boxing and unboxing operations resulted in a severe performance penalty. But the original developer didn't figure this out, tried to fix the problem by adding some multithreading on top... and of course botching it.

Introduced some sensible data types, got rid of the multithreading and it really got smooth...

[iamcreasy]

I played with Swing a bit and really liked the control it provides. Is there any book that you recommend other than Filthy Rich Clients by Chet Haase to develop complex Swing application or to pick up good habits?

Is swing still developed and is there any reason I should pick JavaFX over Swing?

[joshmarinacci]

Funny you mention that. I co-wrote Swing Hacks for O’Reilly in 2005 and I still get about 50$ A year in royalties. So someone must still be writing Swing Apps.