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Within this post I just want to listen to people opinion.
I develop under java and I use to use Java swing to create my graphical interface. I am not a big expert in it but I can usually handle to do what I need.
However, I believe they are not the best solution since sometimes easy things require quite an effort to be implemented.
I know that there are many other such as AWT (old one) QT, GTK etc., but I never try them (beside a bit of AWT when needed)
I would like to as the community opinion about them. which is the best for you and for which reason? If i should invest some time studying a new one which would you sudgest me?
here is a comparison of AWT vs SWT vs SWING
AWT vs SWT vs Swing
Hope this helps
I'm not sure which one is better, faster or easier, but I know that I'd gladly spend some time learning GTK or QT 'cause there are GTK and QT libraries not just for Java, but for lot of other languages and I assume that API and gui design principles are pretty similar in every other language, so, if I learn Java GTK, it would be easier for me to learn, for example, PyGTK later, if I need to develop python desktop app.
I am pretty capable when it comes creating GUIS in Java using Swing, however I can't help feeling that what I am creating is a little too simple. I am getting annoyed when trying to make quick changes.
If I had more free time I would love to spend time becoming more familar with Swing however at the moment that is out of the question.
So my question for the community is, do you have any thoughts on an alternative way for me to make more attractive GUIs?
This is a very good thread discussing this. Swing is a very capable framework/library, and you can do many things with it and certainly attractive GUIs.
If you like, you can use a GUI designer, such as the one that comes with Netbeans.
If you don't want to stay with Swing, there is SWT, but, that adds your bloat to your code since it isn't standard, and it won't necessarily make your app look better.
I am not saying this is a good idea, but you could use Adobe Air/Flash to create your GUI and then use BlazeDS to communicate between Java and Flex/Air/Flash. It does look better but then you are programming in Flash which some people don't like.
Not saying that is a good idea, but it does work.
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I've been doing some research into taking my programming experience and moving into the java programming marketplace, due to a combination of personal interest and local market forces. As you can gather from the title, the vast majority of my experience has been in building web-based sites and applications, and I'd like to move as much of my previous experience as possible.
One thing that I've been unable to find a concrete answer for when should a website or web-based application designer look to going with a Java based solution, over other options currently on the market. What options would Java provide that would have a designer select Java as the basic coding language to base a project upon?
Thank you for any constructive replies that may arrive from this inquiry.
EDIT: I should have included the caveat of if other factors are equal, for example if hardware, software, developer skill in java is up to where they should be for such projects, and so forth.
The main factor is what your developers are adept in. If you've got a bunch of Java developers, go with Java.
Consider this also: Java tends to run on app servers where there is a persistent global program running, and separate threads/processes spawn off to service individual requests. However, if the main global VM croaks for some reason, your whole app can go down. The benefit of course is that you get application/system level resources that you can initialize and use continuously across all requests
Other environments like PHP basically tear down and rebuild the entire environment for each request. You can code in application level data persistence using a database, but you don't get it for free. On the other hand, if one php process croaks while processing app data, it won't kill the whole system , as the entire environment is just torn down/rebuilt for the next request.
Agreed with many of the previous posters, but one possible consideration is runtime speed.
If you are using a very basic LAMP stack server, running PHP4 or lower, Python or Perl, if you do not set pre-compilation, all of your scripts will have to be re-compiled at runtime. This can cause immense stress on the server for high intensity applications. If you're in the situation where you cannot enable pre-compiling for LAMP, but you can for Java (most Java servers require this), then this should be of concern. The disadvantage is that you may have to re-compile large chunks of your web application every time you edit it. I realize this is becoming less and less of an issue nowadays, but its something to check.
Be sure to include a learning curve in the development time if developers aren't familiar with the chosen language.
For the most part, the best technology is the one you are already using.
If you have coders that know java, have system administrators that can configure java apps and know what to do when a java app stops working, and project managers who know how to accurately schedule and plan a java deployment, you would need a very, very compelling reason to pick something else like .NET for a new project, even if .NET is "better" (whatever that means).
There are, of course, exceptions; if you're using something obsolete and/or is not going to be supported in the future (like classic ASP), or you have no legacy systems, then it's time to use something new.
I believe that the conventional wisdom on this subject is that Java is better suited to very large systems that need the discipline of static typing. Also, on very busy sites, Java can use less memory and run faster than most interpreters.
(Right out of the box, Java wants lots of memory. But on a busy system Java has only one copy of all running code.)
There are also certain prosaic reasons to stick with Java, for specific sites. They might need back-office integration or some other big piece of existing code.
I would use Java if there was a library or framework that provided specific features that no other language did (or not as well).
For example, if I had an in-house-built java library for running our Gruntmaster rock crusher, then it naturally would make sense to use Java to build an app that needed to control the Gruntmaster.
Some might say that whatever one's shop's official language is the language one should use--I disagree with that rule, as in my experience a good developer can learn any language.
There is no hard and fast rule otherwise; each language has its own strengths and weaknesses. The fact that you are asking this question about Java tells me that you are not as familiar with it.
I'd suggest you go ahead and build an app or three in Java -- then you'll know. :)
There is very little separation between the capabilities of the various technologies available today for web programming.
Java at one time was the default choice since it far surpassed the abilities of the competing technologies, but that is no longer true.
The Microsoft answer has matured rapidly; the days of classic ASP are far gone with .Net now providing all the abilities and ease of programming that Java has offered.
New languages such as PHP and Ruby have arrived or become much more mainstream, and are also valid choices based on your programming needs.
So as many others are saying it boils down to what language you or your developers are familiar with.
Another aspect to consider, is the ability to use a vast eco-system of open source libraries.
Languages like PHP, Perl or Ruby have such lib market places (almost) built in. .Net is rather closed in that sense. Java on the other hand has a a very large, enterprise grade eco-system of libraries to choose from and communities to learn from as well.
Practically I agree with the guys about leveraging existing human infrastructure.
Technologically, Java is quite good for non-standard web things - like heavy use of AJAX (GWT, DWR, Comet spring to mind), Mobile (where you generally need lots of session data and less front-end bling), really simple things that are going to be put under immense load (it will definitely trounce Apache mod_XXX every time, the only thing faster in wide-spread use is native code).
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I need to have an at-home project now that I'm working on Python/Django at work. I'd like to learn something new, so I was thinking of checking out Java.
What's the most well respected web framework for deploying Java web apps?
The only reason I'm not checking out ruby on rails is because of how similar the ORM and other parts are to Django.
Alternatively, does anyone think I should take a look at seaside/smalltalk? Can anyone explain why I should?
Haskell is something I'll consider if anyone can make a good argument for it. I'd need a web framework and database access library to go along with it though.
I'd consider factor/forth if I wasn't so accustomed to the stack paradigm via x86/asm. I'd be willing to hear any counter-arguments to this as well.
See also: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9v3uf/asm_c_python_perl_lisp_scheme_programmer_looking/
With that range of skills, why don't you learn something more outside your comfort zone, like carpentry or painting, or any of hundreds of other skills that have little to do with your field.
At some point, all languages are the same and you'll get scant benefit from learning another.
Whereas, with something totally different, you will become a much more well-rounded individual. I, for one, like painting and golf, even though I'm not that good at either of them - when I asked my golf instructor what my handicap was, he said it was an inability to hit the ball straight :-)
I find that I enjoy doing stuff I'm not accustomed to since it's a genuinely new experience. Learning another computer skill is a easy thing to do after a while and hence the pleasure from doing it is reduced.
Don't get me wrong, I like to keep up with developments in the field but, for the most part, the brand new technologies give nothing to my career since most work I do is on stable technologies. You may be in a different situation.
Haskell is pretty popular these days as a mind-bender, though it may not hurt as much for you if you already know Lisp and Scheme. It's purely functional, so there are no side effects to anything. You have to use monads to print text and do other things that require a certain order. It's also completely lazily evaluated, so you can make infinite lists in Haskell and not have to worry about memory consumption.
The Haskell Platform may not be fully complete, but is intended to be a portable set of libraries for Haskell. It's list of packages includes some for CGI handling and (X)HTML generation.
Sounds like you're into web programming, so smalltalk/seaside is a great one. IMO everyone should learn smalltalk even if they never use it, and seaside is a really different web framework than what you are used to. Django, fer instance, is all about REST, while the seaside philosophy basically says "to hell with REST."
And if you've never coded in an image based environment there's just something about it that seems... natural, magical even. Lots of IDE functionality that originated in smalltalk have been implemented in file based language IDE's, but it always feels like an unnatural grafting, where those same features feel as if they simply belong there in smalltalk.
Check out Pharo. Give it enough time to get used to the fact that there's no menu bar and see if it doesn't grab you.
I do suggest Java. When I was looking for a job, I noticed lots of openings for Java developers, so there's a lot of it out there, and you might someday have a chance to use your Java skills.
And then you should try out Scala. Scala is a sort of Python-ish language that uses functional programming to make very scalable programs. Unlike Python, in Scala you do need to declare types of things. Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine so it can be used in Java shops.
http://www.scala-lang.org/
It's possible I'm just giving you this answer because these are the next two languages I intend to learn, myself.
You probably should also spend a little time playing around with Javascript. Javascript was sort of intended to be a "stealth Lisp" and I imagine you would pick it right up.
http://www.crockford.com/javascript/javascript.html
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/030920.html
And heck, have some fun with it. Write a game or something!
From your list I'd say you are due for a completely object oriented language.
You could check out Ruby, but I'd recommend JavaScript since it offers a lot of interesting things you probably wouldn't expect, like support for closures, higher-order functions and prototypical inheritance - plus it's kinda fun and becoming very popular.
I'd need a web framework and database access library to go along with it though.
If all your programming is based on web frameworks and SQL databases, you will only be solving the same problems with different syntax if you switch languages.
Build something using a different data model - Prolog, Conceptual Graphs, RDF, Linda/JavaSpaces, XQuery, HDF5, ASN.1, or a different network model - XMPP pub-sub, SNMP, a zero-config mesh or a swarm of ZigBee enabled Arduinos.
Maybe look at languages like Oz, Io or Erlang/OTP, which are distributed rather than primarily monolithic like the ones you mention.
What about the Java Spring framework?
http://www.springsource.org/
Or maybe NHibernate?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHibernate
At the end of the day its up to you. As I only listed two out of many. When I am programming a static language professonally... I try to learn a dynamic or scripting language. And vice versa.
Also, I try to learn something totally different or outside my realm... maybe even Powershell or Korn shell or ActionScript.
What's the most well respected web framework for deploying Java web apps?
There is no single web framework more respected than others. Struts2, Spring MVC, Stripes or Wicket (which is event based) are all good candidates (I personally like Stripes). But you'll need a bit more for the persistence (Hibernate or JPA) and for the glue (Spring).
Grails (Groovy on Rails) is another good option.
Alternatively, does anyone think I should take a look at seaside/smalltalk? Can anyone explain why I should?
Well, I guess that learning Smalltalk can't hurt but I don't see a good reason to choose Smalltalk over a moderner language like Java. Regarding tooling, I don't know anything in this field except VisualAge for Smalltalk but, personally, I'd really stay far away from it.
Haskell is something I'll consider if anyone can make a good argument for it. [...]
Looks like I'm not the right guy for that.
I'd consider factor/forth if I wasn't so accustomed to the stack paradigm via x86/asm. I'd be willing to hear any counter-arguments to this as well.
Same as above.
I would have suggested mastering Lisp (in some relevant dialect) so even if you have Lisp and Scheme on your resume, it might be worthwhile to REALLY learn deeply. See http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html for reasons why.
Otherwise Prolog might interest you. It is related to SQL but for programming instead of communicating with an organised set of data tables.
If you want to target web technologies I only have experience with Java. Here the newest Java Server Faces (JSF) allow for using Ajax to update pages, and Google Web Toolkit allow for very rich component based web pages. These might be juicy enough to interest you enough to learn enough Java to find them fun :)
I don’t see C# and the .NET platform on your list. And I am surprised no one mentioned it yet.
I have worked in C# for 5 years. I have looked at some Java code but I have never coded in it. I believe that Java is somewhat similar to C# enough so that if you become proficient in one I think you could pick up the other is a matter of a few days.
One idea might be to create your own language / compiler. The one I would like to create (or see created) would be an Assembly Language level compiler with an object oriented syntax that would be very much like Python… but make it typed language. You could start with the basic raw binary types db, dw, dd, and then add on to these … The functions and methods could have assembly language freely mixed in the high-level code. Now, that would be a fun project, I think ?
Definitely try Haskell or Smalltalk or Forth.
I would say Smalltalk would be most useful while Forth would get you away from the x86 asm and C bullshit. There's more than one way to code close-to-the-hardware stuff.
Why don't you try OCaml? And if you ever happen (sadly) to return to .NET world - you will have knowledge of F# in your baggage.
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For "best" I intend that the code shouldn't need, or need very few, platform specific tweaks.
I strongly recommend Java for cross-platform GUI development. In particular, I recommend the GUI builder that comes with the Netbeans IDE. It's very simple and very powerful. You can point and click and drag and drop to create a GUI, and easily customize the actions which various buttons and other components take.
I much prefer Python as a language, but none of the free tools for GUI development come anywhere close to this, and the same thing seems to be true for the other languages I've used. (I should point out that QT has wonderful GUI developers for various languages such as C and Python, but it's only free when used on open source projects.)
EDIT: QT has recently been relicensed as LGPL, so you're free to use it in commercial applications. The Python bindings for this (PyQT) have not been re-licensed, but another project called PySide has been created to provide Python QT bindings.
I personally despise the whole concept of emulating the native GUI that is where the Java GUIs are rooted. Instead of being at home wherever you go, it makes you a tourist everywhere, often needing an interpreter. The Eclipse GWT is a better toolkit that makes much better use of local resources, but it still holds that people love to write Java code, and hate to use Java applications, think of it: which Java applications you love on your desktop?
Tk is just as ugly and limited on any operating system you choose to run it onto, and the same goes for Qt, in my opinion.
Mono would need a good try, as it is a way to answer the question "why Linux sucks", if you remember that old post bi Miguel de Icaza. Mono comes with a mature set of widgets and Apis and does not try to limit what you can do in order to give you portability.
Silverlight is close to portable and has a great interface definition language, but lacks access to the system, you have to split the application between a server and UI even on the same machine to overcome it.
Adobe AIR is a dog and local system acces is not easy.
If I am able to choose, I tend to avoid GUIs altogether and try to use a web server, even a local web server, and Json, JQuery and all that stuff. I found out that I can have many more choices and am more productive than with native widgets. This combines the strengths of the use of a real language server side and the wonderful disordered geniality of JavaScript in the GUI.
Yes: use Eclipse RCP. You can write not only cross-platform, but e.g. multilingual applications with it. SWT provides the native look-and-feel for multiple platforms and windowing systems.
So as I understand it, there is currently NO truly cross-platform high level language & GUI toolkit right now.
Java is cross-platform, GUIs in both SWT and Swing can look good, when you really try hard to tweak them pixel-precise and provide modifications to the look to supported platforms. There are currently some good GUI designers, but nothing as great as OpenStep 15 years ago.
QT is now LGPL'ed so long as you only link to it dynamically. Well but QT has its own set of problems and is a superset of C++. You have to compile against QT-hacked compiler, not the generic C++ one.
didn't try the wxWidgets, but from the looks of it, it can work, but is NOT high level toolkit at all!
There seems to be an option to write in C# and opensourced .NET and run it via Mono in other platforms than Windows... Didn't try, but it seems to me, that is just porting Microsoft on other platforms.
There is GNUstep, but for now it looks for me, like it is only developped by some opensource geek fans. It would be really interesting to see the OpenStep stack outside of the Mac OS X, but for now this looks to me as not viable.
Even Java, while it is self-contained, does not currently provide great GUI designer capabilities. I used the GUI designer tool once when starting to learn how to code with SWT, and now I find myself coding it by hand, which is really not bad, but it really should not be necessary. But that was few years ago, I will have to try again.
You can of course create your cross-platform application core and service code in one language (Java, or C/C++ if you want speed), creating something like a server or unix tool and just connecting to it from the GUI that you create on each desired platform using its own tools. The result is that the GUI is platform native, taking advantages of the features of the platform, and should be fairly simple to create for each desired platform. (Cocoa on Mac and .Net on windows provide rich features for the platform they are native to).
We will have to look into the robustness and matureness of such ideal solution. It should have good commercial and comunity backing and be fairly evolved right now, so as the future implementations of such tools will provide us with more than the mere LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR for all the supported platforms, but to leverege the cross-platform tools to include and adopt well-designed concepts and rich features native to the relevant platforms and distribute them cross-platform.
Only than can be cross-platform development truly viable and adoptable in great numbers.
Suggestions?
Java is certainly nice, but I've been doing just fine with Python and Qt via PyQt4 lately. I find that I get things done faster than I did in Swing or SWT, too.
So far, no platform-specific tweaks have been necessary, and Qt4 widgets look nice on different platforms. The Qt GUI builder is very nice, and using Python has enabled easy integration with some other cross-platform frameworks (notably VTK, scipy-cluster, and some SWIG-wrapped objects for interfacing with files output from a performance tool).
Note that Qt is not free unless you use it on open source projects.
As long as someone defines "platform independence" correctly, Java is the best.
Some people argue that C# is the best, but those people seem to misunderstand the term
"platform independence" ;)
Note: I refer to the fact that C# is ported to Linux/Unixes only as long as Microsoft and Novel keep up their treaty. The community itself would never be able to maintain such huge platform as .NET
These days there are many languages that allow you to create cross-platform GUI applications efficiently. Java, Python, Tcl/tk, C#...
I think you need to define the requirements of your application a bit more, for instance:
Will the UI be Web-based, or desktop-based?
Is the application going to be a large or a small?
Will it feature some sort of "extension" feature (e.g. plug-ins)?
Will it function over a network, and is it likely to be distributed/load balanced?
The list can go on forever, work out the defining points about your application, and start researching the language based on the whole.
I would also consider Mono as serious contender for platform independence and a good IDE tool.
Java's performance sucks on the desktop. Just check http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/RuntimePerformance.aspx
For native binaries, wxWidgets is a convenient solution.
I would tell you that is even better than Java for the user experience side. Even though you can make the presentation layer look pretty much the same for all platforms in Java, they all look like Java. On the other hand, wxWidgets make the user feel like a platform specific build (and it is, indeed), but you can use the same code to compile for several platforms (at least the major ones).
I would think that it depends on what kind of platforms you plan on targeting. Java will have the most platforms with a VM. However, if you just want to use Windows and Linux, you can use C# (using mono on linux).
Based on your definition, no. Even wit the newest graphical libraries you can expect to do a bunch of testing on different platforms.
Flash would probably be the best. Wide spread and better at looking the same across different platforms.