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Is there a good framework for Java desktop applications? [closed]

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I have developed many desktop applications in Swing, even those a bit more complex, with Hibernate and Spring integration. I found out that many things repeats and should be done quickly and in convenient way, like application lifecycle, logging, alerts, authorisation, forms and their validation. I started looking for frameworks. I met Swing Application Framework which is dead since several years, as it turned out. Spring RCP really met with my expectations, especially creating forms basing on Java Bean model is what I liked, but I realised it is dead too. Netbeans RCP is not for me, I am using Eclipse and I don't want to use another IDE for desktop development. I am not really excited about Eclipse RCP, I got feeling that it is too Eclipse oriented, I would prefer something low coupled to any tool, besides it is not so straightforward to learn.
I am surprised that there is so weak support for developing desktop-based business applications in Java. It's like Java was only used in web environment. What is the preferred language for making such apps then? And if I want to stay with Java, is there a chance to find something similar to Spring RCP (so far I couldn't)?

i asked a similar question some time ago, see Swing desktop-development if you are interested.
My conclusion was/is that there simply are no frameworks that can do for your desktop-application, what any of the bazillion great WEBframeworks can do for your webapplication. It seems absurd, but in my experience due to the great web-frameworks and the lack of desktop-frameworks it has become much easier to develop a webapplication.
I have been using Spring-RCP for 2 projects. It was great, but is pretty much unusable nowadays, because you are stuck to spring 2.5 with it. Also it "feels" a bit slow to me and is really memory hungry on 64-bit machines, which is a Spring-Swing problem most likely: https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-9628
I waited for Project Valkyrie, but it seems to be dead already
I think you will not find anything that completely covers your requirements. http://swingx.java.net/ could maybe offer you a few GUI-Widgets, like JXDatePicker. I also recommend JGoodies Binding and JGoodies Form, both are great. IF you use a client-server application i highly recommend using Spring-Remoting (e.g. HTTP Invoker) with Spring-Security. Really makes things simpler.
I enjoy developing desktop-apps with Swing, but unfortunatly you really have to "go the extra mile". Client-Server-communication, security or even validation are only a few examples of the many things that seem overcomplicated these days (compared to modern webframeworks). Also you might find out that it is not as easy to automatically build, sign and deploy an application with java-webstart as it should be.
Spring-RCP was the closest thing to a "complete" desktop-framework that i found so far and it has been dead for years.
Good Luck!

Please try griffon. This is based on groovy language and inspired by grails framework. It runs on JVM, language is very much friendly for java programmers.
Quote from the site
Griffon is an application framework for developing desktop
applications in the JVM, with Groovy being the primary language of
choice. Inspired by Grails, Griffon follows the Convention over
Configuration paradigm, paired with an intuitive MVC architecture and
a command line interface.
....
The architecture is very much extensible.
The Griffon framework is extensible via Plugins. There are many to
choose from. For example you'll find plugins for 3rd party Swing
components like Swingx, Jide and Macwidgets; persistence related
plugins like DataSource, GSQL, Hibernate among others; 3D graphics and
animation support is possible via JOGL, LWJGL and Processing. And many
more!

It mostly depends on the size of the application.
For smaller and medium sized apps it makes sense to use JavaFX 2 that does not use a differnt language, you can start of by some of the basic tutorials .
As you have mentioned for Enterprise level application Eclipse RCP and Netbeans RCP are a good pick.
Netbeans RCP is lot simpler for development, you should not dismiss it just because of the IDE preferences. There is a free book about it that is a good starting point.
There is also the option of e4 that should be significant improvement for eclipse but I can't say that I have used it yet
Related resource worth looking might be :
http://netbeans.dzone.com/why-from-eclipse-rcp-to-netbeans-platform
Netbeans RCP vs Eclipse RCP

Check out JGoodies. Not only is the Look and Feel much better they also offer a framework to design Swing apps.
The big issue when it comes to desktop applications is that it really depends on what you're trying to design. Unlike webapps where it's webpage->request->webpage, desktop application can pretty much do anything. There is no standard cycle, even for business apps. It's much much more like AJAX than say your normal Java EE or PHP webapp. And how many AJAX libraries actually offer a framework other than calling and updating specific components.
You could have menus, buttons, panels being updated, things being rendered on the fly, graphs changing, data being updated, etc.
If you're just looking for forms, then JGoodies is probably your best bet.

I don't know of any framework as such, but Netbeans provides a drag and drop wizard for Swing components. Eclipse also has similar plugin but it is based on the Netbeans plugin.

I found out that many things repeats and should be done quickly and in convenient way, like application lifecycle, logging, alerts, authorisation, forms and their validation.
I'd recommend to extract these into your personal "Core" library that you can share and use across all your projects. Since you already implemented the things you're talking about, it should be easier to generalize them than study a completely new framework. Probably, a private Maven project?
The development focus is moving towards Web and Mobile, so we shouldn't expect any considerable efforts from framework vendors for Desktop.

Is Java the best language to develop cross-platform GUI applications? [closed]

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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.

What platform would you recommend to develop a SAAS application? [closed]

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Should I use LAMP, .Net, or any other platform? I have access to resources with LAMP, .Net, ROR and Java experience. Thanks.
Sorry for being vague. Could you give me a few pluses and minuses of each like Paul? Thanks for your time and effort.

If you're planning to host the system, then you are best to work in a language that you are comfortable with and can hire people to help you. That means you want something reasonably popular, but also oriented towards the type of functionality you are implementing. Presumably you are writing some form of web application.
Personally, my favorite web app language was Perl, but it took a huge amount of self-discipline to keep from making it a mess. It's probably not great for big teams, and it's hard to hire people with experience.
PHP is great for pounding out web apps, and it has a big following. Unless I haven't been keeping up on it LAMP, .Net, ROR and PHP are all bounded by web 1.0 technologies, which means augmenting them with a JavaScript library like Dojo if you want to use AJAX (which is all the rage these days).
If the software is enterprise, then Java or C# are more sellable, but since you're running it yourself that doesn't matter. Personally I'd stay far away from J2EE, it's just too much complexity for too little functionality.
My latest combo is Java, GWT and hibernate, but I find they are very difficult technologies to master. Good if you have the time for long term development, but not so great if you're in a hurry.
So, if you're in a rush, prototyping in LAMP, with a very simple 1.0 front-end is probably best, then later once you've crystallized the concept, redoing the system in some stronger technology will help you get to the next level of performance.
Paul.

If its a professional project then use whatever you have the best resources for, if you don't know then ask your coworkers what they would be most comfortable with. If things really are equal (and I doubt they are) then use each of the platforms to write a random platform selector, and use that to make your choice.
Conversly if its a personal project and you are looking for something new, then use the thing that you know least about.

Waaaay too subjective/argumentative.
They all have gains and losses and are all adept at SAAS type architectures these days. Use whichever you're most or least comfortable with depending on your goals.

Try to see which platform has purpose built solutions. I know in .NET there is Apprenda's SaaSGrid and in Java, BEA was working on something called Genesis, but I think it was cancelled when Oracle bought them.

My answer is the same as Paul's.
Know who your users are and if they have software requirements, such as Microsoft licenses etc. It's much easier to bind Microsoft applications with .net than any other language.
Know your budget if you have one. PHP will be the cheapest and fastest to build a web app in. All you need is apache, roughly 10 lines of site configuration, and about 50 lines of code for a SAAS app.
Is it a once-off develop and forget? Most applications won't be, so you'll need to develop it in a language that's accessible and well supported. No point developing in Ruby or Perl if you need high availability, accessibility and support.
Keep in mind that you can develop enterprise-level applications in PHP, Java and .NET. One of the reasons why people develop in .NET and Java for enterprise level applications is for the available support, stricter languages, typically better developers etc. It's a myth that PHP is no good for enterprise - each platform is only as strong as its weakest component.
Are you using an Oracle or Microsoft database? While PHP can connect to those systems, they require additional drivers to do so.
First of all, figure out what you're trying to build. Prototype it in a language that you won't develop the final solution in (unless that language is your strongest and most competent language) so that you simply can't continue using the prototype as the final solution. Transfer the business logic, framework scaffolding and library ideas to your chosen language.
I've developed SaaS apps in PHP before, and from my experience there's hundreds of ways to skin the same cat so to speak
Pros:
Cheap development
Rapid development
Low server costs
Low initial maintenance costs
Cons:
Semi-competent developers who are most likely unfamiliar with OOP & SAAS concepts (this is almost always a given)
Expensive maintenance down the track, especially point 1
Performance overhead without effective caching strategies
Every developer who touches the application will want to develop it into their own system
Not a strongly typed language, so type hints are very important as well as constantly validating input for type and correctness (word?)
Hope that helps...

You could use a free web RAD called 4WS.Platform:
www.4wsplatform.org
which is free.
You could deploy it in Google App Engine and use it to create web applications on the cloud, which are a Saas solution...

Java Desktop application framework [closed]

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I am working on designing and building a desktop application. I am thinking about using eclipse or netbeans for the base of this application. However, I have never built on either of these platforms. I am personally leaning to using netbeans because it seams like that platform is an easer learning curve. But, I wanted to ask people that have actually build on these platforms before which one is easier to use?
My personal definition of easer is as follows:
Easy to get started with
Consistent and logical API
Good documentation
Easy to build and deploy
Thanks very much,
Josh

I can't say enough about the Eclipse RCP platform. I would recommend it for any Java desktop app development.
It's free, has great tutorials, and allows cross-platform development of rich desktop applications that use native OS windowing toolkit, meaning that your application will look native in any platform. It also has a clean API that stays out of your way, and makes deploying to any platform a piece of cake.
If your interested check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Rich-Client-Platform-Applications/dp/0321334612

Easy to use: I have experience developing on Eclipse and I have to say it's not easy to understand its development model. Sure for basic stuff it has some wizards that make easier, but for something a little more complex it's just difficult. I don't know about Netbeans, but I heard its easier.
Consistent API: I think Eclipse wins in this aspect. It runs over OSGI (brings some complexity though) and has plugins extensions for pretty much everything. It seems to be the platform of choice for plugin development, so I can assume it's reliable.
Documentation: Eclipse wins by far. The help from eclipse site is excelent and the mailing list has plenny of users questions.

I have used Eclipse as a framework base but it was mostly just using SWT-- we didn't really use much of the RCP.
It really depends on what you're writing, but from what I have learned from using Eclipse it is really only suited for writing an app that involves you editing data using various views (just like editing code).
Anything more random that than can cause you to start pushing the framework in a direction it wasn't designed and causing massive fail.

You'll use Swing to develop your application because any other windowing framework is useful only if you have a previous knowledge or the appropriate background.
You can rely on http://www.javadocking.com/ to streamline you application.
If your application requirements are highly focused on the user interface, maybe you can look in another direction like Adobe Air.

RCP has a bigger learning curve, but once you learn the basics the Eclipse IDE itself supports building RCP applications very well. I have only built a plugin for NetBeans (not build a full-fledged application), and the learning curve was lesser than for the RCP application. The book Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications provides a detailed introduction to building RCP applications.

Please see some of the open source applications at http://www.eclipse.org/community/rcp.php before opining that RCP is only for building a text editor. Thanks.

I have a similar task and I am also considering different frameworks. I have some experience with Eclipse (~4 months developing RCP) and now Netbeans (played around for a couple of days). IMHO these frameworks are too complicated. You just end up debugging into Eclipse-specific plugin loaders trying to figure out why you get a ClassNotFoundException or a NullPointer. The same story with NetBeans: somehow somewhere somewhat reads out xml config files and creates UI from that, cool, as long as you follow the tutorial. And of course you can't develop and Eclipse-based RCP using some other IDE, NB is also very jealous about its usage (unless you do some hacks like I did).
What I'm lacking is a clear way to debug my threads from main to action performed. Instead I'm always told what I have to do to avoid exceptions. And so I have to keep my fingers crossed each time I'm trying to pull something new. And it never works out the first time.
Now I thought about the features I need and I looked out for smaller projects that aim at specific functionality like plugin management eg. And there are plenty. Just compile a list of the functionality you need and start adding smaller frameworks by integrating them into your project. This also makes sense since your project should consume less RAM in the end.

Introduction to Eclipse RCP.

I've done a little work with both, but only on relatively simple applications. Both seem to have roughly equal capabilities. I personally prefer the Netbeans platform as it makes more sense to me.
You should also consider JSR-296, the Swing Application Framework. It provides a basic framework for building Swing Applications, managing application resources, state, etc, but without as much "baggage" as Netbeans and Eclipse. Netbeans IDE has a number of tools for building applications on the SAF. See https://appframework.dev.java.net/ for more info.
Without knowing more about your application, it's hard to point you at the appropriate strengths/weaknesses of the two platforms.

If you really want to avoid crossplatform maintainance then work with Swing. This buys you all platforms. RCP requires native libraries for each platform.
We have had good experiences with Swing.

I would use eclipse RCP when you really need a platform to built on top, not just "widgetery" like swing or swt. RCP is rock solid and consistent, modular and very flexible. Once you master it, you get huge benefits. Being a platform it give you the most commonly used things - preference, configurations, automatic updates, layout management, branding and things like that. You build a product, not an app. But learning curve is pretty steep in the beginning.
Swing on the other hand is not a platform, you will re-invent the wheel by writing your own things I mentioned above. But yes, swing is faster to learn and get started. I think it fits better for smaller applications with shorter life span.

Look some of the open source applications at http://www.eclipse.org/community/rcp.php before opening that RCP is only for building a stuff.

Is there a real benefit of using J#? [closed]

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I just saw a comment of suggesting J#, and it made me wonder... is there a real, beneficial use of J# over Java? So, my feeling is that the only reason you would even consider using J# is that management has decreed that the company should jump on the Java bandwagon... and the .NET bandwagon. If you use J#, you are effectively losing the biggest benefit of picking Java... rich cross platform support. Sure there is Mono, but it's not as richly supported or as full featured right? I remember hearing Forms are not fully (perhaps at all) supported.
I'm not trying to bash .NET here, I'm just saying, if you are going to go the Microsoft route, why not just use C#? If you are going to go the Java route, why would J# enter the picture?
I'm hoping to find some real world cases here, so please especially respond if you've ACTUALLY used J# in a REAL project, and why.

J# is no longer included in VS2008. Unless you already have J# code, you should probably stay away.
From j# product page:
Since customers have told us that the
existing J# feature set largely meets
their needs and usage of J# is
declining, Microsoft is retiring the
Visual J# product and Java Language
Conversion Assistant tool to better
allocate resources for other customer
requirements. The J# language and JLCA
tool will not be available in future
versions of Visual Studio. To preserve
existing customer investments in J#,
Microsoft will continue to support the
J# and JLCA technology that shipped
with Visual Studio 2005 through to
2015 as per our product life-cycle
strategy. For more information, see
Expanded Microsoft Support Lifecycle
Policy for Business & Development
Products.

The whole purpose of J# is to ease the transition of Java developers to the .NET environment which didn't work so well (I guessing here) so Microsoft dropped J# from Visual Studio 2008.
For your question, "Is there a real benefit of using J#?"..
in a nutshell... No..

Instead of J#, I would rather prefer IKVM (http://www.ikvm.net/) to convert my JARs to .NET assemblies as well as access Java APIs in C#.

One of the killers I've found with J# in the past is that there is no built in support for referencing web services. That alone has been enough to deter me from it ever since.

C# syntax is so close to Java (and better in some ways) that you might as well learn C# instead of J#. And since C# is more widely used, you can easily find Java --> C# tutorials on google or check out http://www.asp.net/learn and watch some videos.

I don't think it's a matter of which language is better. In the .NET world there are some inconsistencies between the libraries different languages provide. There are certain functionality that is available in VB.NET that you might like to use from C# but can't. I remember I had to use J# to use some ZIP libraries that were not available in any other language in .NET.

I have used J# as an easy interim step to port a java library into C#. It made for a good way to port code I don't plan to maintain from Java to .Net. However, all new development is being done in C#.

Strongly agree that syntactically C# beats Java hands down, so there is really no reason to lament the demise of j#. Now trying to get c# compiling to Java bytecode might be an interesting move as Sun's hotspot jvm is great software.
Or, for a bit of fun with what might well become the next generation of Java, how about Scala on the CLR...