We are starting a new Desktop application and considering using javafx but we are a bit confused given the recent announcement by oracle that javafx scripting is not going to be developed further.
Since we cannot wait for javafx 2.0, is it a good idea to use the version 1.3 (which) or should we look at a different technology?
Your opinion will be very much appreciated.
JavaFX 2.0 has been released General Availability http://javafx.com
and http://javafx.com/downloads/all.jsp
and the roadmap has been updated http://javafx.com/roadmap/
You should have a close look at the license for JavaFX, particularly the provisions for distribution if you are developing a desktop application.
My understanding of the current 1.3 license is that distribution of the run-time is prohibited, except through Java Web Start. This is pretty much a deal-breaker for us on the desktop.
There has been an ever increasing trend away from desktop applications to web applications recently, and the advantages are large. Browsers are becoming more sophisticated, so you can do many desktop like features via a browser (and if you are considering JavaFX, then HTML based technologies may give you everything you need).
Also, a web application gives you the flexibility to update your code without having the user update it for you. Most browsers also allow you to launch in application mode (e.g the Chrome -app switch), which locks down the browser to specifically only point at your application.
If you truely want a real desktop experience though, then Swing or SWT should be sufficient for your needs.
Another alternative is Pivot.
Rumors of JavaFX script's death have been greatly exaggerated. It lives on, and is now called Visage.
While development is not incredibly active, over the last 30 days there have been 9 check-ins from 4 different people.
"Wounded"? Sure. "Dead"? Nope.
You could also use adobe flex. This is the technology that appears to be winning this war right now. I really liked the idea of using JavaFX with existing java work. I scrapped the idea because it would be really irresponsible to a) use a dead technology that looks like Oracle will not support in the future b) waiting on vaporware is not a good strategy (their JavaFX 2.0 future api).
Someone also mentioned apache pivot. Not sure how mainstream that is or what it's future support will be. According to their about it is a mainstream project:
"Pivot joined the Apache Incubator in January 2009 and graduated as a top-level Apache project in December 2009. It is currently driven entirely by the software development community."
I would run, not walk, away from JavaFX 1.3...
JMHO
Java FX2 allows you to leverage existing Java technology. I don't know how you would manage file access etc with html5-javascript. I am using JavaFX2 currently for my project and am happy with it.
No doubt that the javafx is improving further and oracle is extending functionality of javafx.
recently oracle announced early release of java 8 in which javafx is inbuilt and is having excellent controls.
Related
We have developed a Windows based Desktop application using Java Swing and build a exe of it using javapackager available in Java 8.
Now we are trying to automate the testing of it using Karate-Robot but Robot could not detect the fields on the GUI of Application. To further dig we have installed AccessibilityInsights suggested by Karate Community to figure out how to access elements on the GUI but it seems that our application is not getting detcetd in it. See attached screenshot.
Can someone help us on how to fix the application?
Will Java Accessibility Bridge help here? As per documentation https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/access/java-accessibility-guide.pdf, Application needs to implement Java Accessibility APIs when it needs to be available to Windows Assistive technologies.
Edit 1: As per https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/misc/access.html, "Because support for the Accessibility API is built into the Swing components, your Swing program will probably work just fine with assistive technologies, even if you do nothing special."
Ashish--
There have been multiple iterations of Windows-based assistive technologies over the years. The current iteration has existed since 2005 and is called UI Automation. This is the technology that is required for OS-provided tools like Magnifier and Narrator. It's also the technology that is required by Accessibility Insights for Windows. From your description, it might also be the technology that is required by Karate-Robot.
Java Accessibility Bridge uses an older iteration of assistive technology that is no longer recognized by OS-provided accessibility tools. It is recognized by some third-party accessibility tools (JAWS and NVDA, for example), but it is not recognized by OS-provided accessibility tools. To the best of my knowledge, Oracle has no plans to support UI Automation in the future. When their docs say that your apps will "work just fine", they're referring to users who rely on these third-party tools.
Accessibility Insights for Windows has made a conscious decision to support only UI Automation, since supporting 2 platforms would make things much more difficult. We chose to go with UI Automation because it is the only technology that is:
Actively supported by the operating system, with new features being regularly added and documented.
Supported by native Windows controls and most actively supported language frameworks.
The technology that we would expect new assistive technology tools to implement first.
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news on this.
DaveTryon (Accessibility Insights team)
i am planning to develop desktop application using java code, and wanted to use any ready
made framework and then i got know about eclipse RCP / eclipse scout but i am in doubt that which framework should i use whether eclipse rcp or eclipse scout ? could somebody suggest me please.
first of all I'd like to add another option: Eclipse Riena.
Eclipse Riena is comparable to Eclipse Scout as it is based on Eclipse RCP and provides some useful abstractions. You should have a look at it.
But to give you some help deciding which one to use:
If you are doing your first steps in Eclipse RCP, I would suggest that you first get your hands dirty with a little bit of plain Eclipse RCP. There is some complexity which will get back to you if just start with a higher level framework like Scout/Riena.
Depending on plans with your desktop application, this might already be good enough.
Scout/Riena do help you with more advanced topics like reuse/standardization, remoting, proven application architecture. But like most frameworks, you lose some flexibility.
What I especially like about Eclipse Riena:
Focus on easy to use GUI (will not fit for every project)
Abstraction over SWT/JFace (Ridgets) provides nice facility for controller tests, rendering the need for GUI tests to a minimum
Nice API to (dynamically ) structure and validate your application
Simplify remoting (no Java EE container dependencies on the client)
You can use parts of Riena independently. Say you can use the ridgets without adding the whole bunch of other perhaps not needed stuff.
What I like about Eclipse Scout
Strong focus on integration in Java EE environment
Wizards all over: Quite simple to create a first and second shot of your GUI
Supports swap of your GUI technology: You can move from SWT to Swing quite swiftly, though I wouldn't bet that is easy for a large application. ;)
HTH
Regards,
Holger
I can't comment/judge about your comments regarding Riena. However, I'd like to add some comments/clarifications regarding Scout
The fact that Scout comes with the Scout SDK tooling is a big help to beginners. This makes it ideal to get started with writing desktop applications. As the output of all the wizards is only Java code and some needed wiring in plugin.xml etc. it means that you're free to do Scout applications without using the Scout SDK (you can even have mixed teams working on the same code). This is possible as the Scout application model is just a bunch of Java classes.
Holger rightly mentions that you can swap the UI technology with Scout applications. This is possible as the programmers writes the model of the UI. For each supported UI technology (currently Swing, SWT, RAP (for web applications)) a specific plugin will actually draw the UI depending on the available UI model. This is a very clean separation of the UI technology and the application model. Therefore swapping works even for very large applications (Of course there are some exceptions to this rule: If your desktop application has some Microsoft Office integration part on the client side you will find it hard to support that in a web application).
Try some of the Scout tutorials and let us know what you think in the forum.
Best regards
Matthias
I have a few questions to understand better Java's usage in context of web applications:-
Is Java EE web development suitable for small start-up (with less human resource) looking to develop an web application ?
What kind of difficulties may arise in Java EE web development, deployment & maintenance ?
What kind of things should be kept in mind/ considerations to be made when moving from PHP background to Java ?
Why Java web applications are not so popular today? ( or in case I perceived it wrongly, please list any major deployments beside linkedIn and ebay)
and Finally, What are some of the most important things to learn before starting web development in Java EE ?
Thank you
Generally the answer to the question of "what technology to use" is "the one which you have most experience with". However, Java EE is huge and clunky, and definitely not good for rapid prototyping, which you will be doing if you're doing a startup.
Personally I would recommend a more modern and dynamic environment. If you're coming from PHP, you should be able to pick up Ruby on Rails or Django (Python) easily. These two choices are in my opinion orders of magnitude better than Java EE. If you want to stick with Java, at least go with the Play framework then.
Is Java EE web development suitable for small start-up (with less human resource) looking to develop an web application ?
Yes, I worked in a startup where I was the only full time programmer.
What kind of difficulties may arise in Java EE web development, deployment & maintenance ?
The same as in any other web development shop. Of course, the problems have their Java flavor. For instance, one bug we discovered was caused by different minor version of JDK used on the live system than on our test system.
What kind of things should be kept in mind/ considerations to be made when moving from PHP background to Java ? Do not code the PHP way. Java's strength is OOP and its many libraries/ open source frameworks. Use that.
Why Java web applications are not so popular today? ( or in case I perceived it wrongly, please list any major deployments beside linkedIn and ebay)
I don't know why you think that, but Java is used everywhere. It is one of the few languages that Google officially uses. They use PHP as well, but it has a "lower" status.
and Finally, What are some of the most important things to learn before starting web development in Java EE ? Use Java's strong points which I mentioned above.
Updated after comment
I cannot make the choice for you. If you are in doubt and in a big hurry you should not go with Java. This is common sense. However, it is an opportunity for your team to learn and grow. Maybe there is a PHP/other client for Cassandra. I knew a former PHP programmer in a startup, who switched to Java. Not saying anything bad about PHP programmers in general, but he did all kinds of strange things, such as not leveraging the power of Java web frameworks and writing lots of procedural code mixed with HTML and SQL. Obviously there are lots of Java programmers who would do the same thing. The point is that your team will probably learn new ways to do things and benefit from it in the future.
Allow me to answer these from the perspectives of a developer/architect in a small start-up, experiencing a bunch of these issues.
What kind of difficulties may arise in Java EE web development, deployment & maintenance ?
How do you decide on which toolset/framework to use? Do you need an IDE? Which version control system and why? Do you want to develop at some place and deploy somewhere else, or develop directly on the server? Do you buy a linux box for this, or rent some cloud? How much do they cost, in terms of licenses and training?
What kind of things should be kept in mind/ considerations to be made when moving from PHP background to Java ?
How would your servlet send out an e-mail? It's much simpler in PHP. Need secure transfer of encrypted objects? Java is your friend. What about session tracking? Use cookies, or have a dedicated class do it? How do you access the database? Want to use hibernate? What other tools is hibernate dependent on? What are their costs (license+learning)? Can you use JDBC directly? What are the pros and cons? Which db to use to why.
Why Java web applications are not so popular today? ( or in case I perceived it wrongly, please list any major deployments beside linkedIn and ebay)
I am not sure if this is the case, but possible reasons could be the availability of .net and integration with C# based systems and Apple ditching Java from its SDK. But that is my speculation, don't quote me on it. I am developing a large scale system myself with Java 6.
and Finally, What are some of the most important things to learn before starting web development in Java EE ?
(This is my opinion) have a test or trial set up of the entire architecture. Is the GUI web-brower based? Is it an applet? Standalone application talking to a server? JNLP system downloading archives and JRE off the net? You will find some stuff do not work on Windows 7, some do not on Vista, W3C have deprecated the applet tag from HTML but Sun/Oracle asks you to use it, different browsers do not support contents of your style sheet, etc.
Firewall set up is another major challenge - you start using thread pooling using Spring libraries and your capabilities to use DBvisualizer to check on DB tables are gone! Now you need a DBA and a sys-admin to fix these who you do not have!
Personally I found the LAMP architecture (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) the fastest way to go for smaller applications, but if you need heavier guns for your app (security, GUI with swing, multithreading, etc), replace the P in LAMP with a tomcat container. The hardest thing I find is to judge the value of a tool in the context of my application - I do not need a tool that generates Java files with getter/setter methods given a list of variables - to me that is yet another level of indirection, but then JUnit in eclipse is helpful for debugging.
Just shared some of my thoughts - hope this helps, - M.S.
For a startup an interesting choice could be the Lift web framework, which is used for developing "Java Web Applications" (although in Scala).
Does anyone have any experience with a really good RIA platform. I'm going to begin developing an application, and I intend to use Netbeans RCP for the thick client. I'd also like to create a RIA version of the same app. I've looked around for a RIA framework that rivals what you can get with the Netbeans RCP, and really haven't found one. My requirements are as follows.
Modular - I would like to be able to add and remove features without recompiling
Out of the box features - I'd like to have feature out of the box that are similar to Netbeans RCP (or most any other RCP), such as a menu system built in, a windowing system (allowing docking and remembering where windows were between sessions), Authentication and Authorization support out of the box, as well as the "Options' pane support (I really like how I can add amodule, and have that module expose options through the standard "options" dialog).
Actions and commands - I'd like to be able to handle actions from other modules without needing to couple the action to the other module.
I would like to deploy the app through GlassFish, but that's not a deal breaker.
Modern - the framework should use the latest standards, and I'm planning on moving to J2EE7 as soon as I can, so the platform must be actively updated to support such a migration.
I'm willing to pay, but the license must not be "per server" or "per instance"
Java isn't a must but I'm planning on using java for the rest of the app (services layer) and the Netbeans RCP front end.
I've been a .net developer for the last 6 years, and have just recently looked into the world of java, and I'm really amazed at the rich community, I thought .net had a large open source community, but the java one is orders of magnitude bigger. I don't know of anything even close to the Netbeans RCP in the .net community, let alone a RIA version.
I've looked at a few frameworks, but most of them seem to be mostly libraries that you can use to build applications, I really don't want to spend the time and maintanance cost to build the infrastructure listed above. Things I've looked at are....
Tepestry
"SmartClient"
GWT
Wicket
These all seem to be good building block, but I want an out of the box solution. The application will be mostly CRUD operations, but I will also be streaming video through the app, as well as handling alerts and events from the server.
Thanks for any advice
Joshua
Eclipse with the GWT plugin is fairly easy to get running out of the box. Step through the GWT tutorial first and you'll be ready to go. I realize you've already looked at GWT but the Eclipse plugin simplifies a lot of grunt work.
Indeed. GWT Eclipse plugin simplifies compilation, depoloying and running them (Jetty). It also has App Engine support.
I have a desktop application . The functionality is complete, but user interface requires a lot of work. I am looking for UI tools.My current operating system is Windows and application is required to run on both Windows and Linux.
Can you guys recommend any?
The software is customized file management application for a specific client, with future plans of web integration.
Thanks in advance :)
Application Environment
Lang : java,
IDE : Eclipse 3.4,
Target Platforms : Windows Vista-OpenSuse 11
SWT is another option. The advantages are a look-and-feel closer to the native platform, and generally faster execution times. The main disadvantage is that you will have to have different distributions for different target platforms, as SWT depends on platform specific libraries.
With an eye toward the web integration, look at GWT. You write your interface in Java but it gets generated into Javascript and can thus be run in a browser. This may make your deployments easier. On the downside, you lose a bit of the rich client UI, but maybe you don't even need that. It all depends on how complex your UI is.
A word of advice: you mentioned future plans of web integration. Take special care to isolate what logic you can from the UI. Keep the UI as clean as possible, and then you may be able to use the same logic in the web UI either on the client or the server.
If you are just looking for a GUI designer you could check out Netbeans IDE which has a built-in Swing user-interface builder.
Alternatively you could build a front-end in JavaFX. There's not much tooling for FX yet but a new tool was recently previewed at JavaOne 09. Not sure when it's being released.
I've used Qt a few times and find it very good at this sort of thing -
Qt Home Page I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for as your application is complete, however, but it may be worth a look.
Found an excellent fix,
UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());
SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI(myform);
looks so cool in my vista and suse , its enough for now.
Thanks for everybody for helping out