On Mar 12, 2018 11:59, "Jaroslav Tulach" <[email protected]> wrote:

> "Oracle has begun conversations with interested parties in the Java

> ecosystem on the stewardship of JavaFX, Swing and AWT beyond the above
>>>> referenced timeframes."
>>>>
>>>
>>
The official announcement is here and people are finally starting to
realize the truth: There is no future for JavaFX, AWT and Swing. Nobody
will sponsor development of anything new for these technologies. Even if
they get transfered to their new owners, they will be in maintenance mode:
Bugfixes and little features. No bigger changes - no new rendering
pipelines using new nifty features of graphics cards. Just sustaining. I've
been explaining this would happen since 2012.

To help us out of this situation and save Java as a programming language I
dedicated my days to smoothing out interoperability between Java and
JavaScript with the goal to reuse the most flexible and portable rendering
system of these days: the browser. My work has already been donated to
Apache, see: https://github.com/apache/incubator-netbeans-html4j - let's
use it to build new features of NetBeans and other future Java desktop
applications. Get started by reading Javadoc at
http://bits.netbeans.org/html+java/

Forget about AWT, Swing and JavaFX - the future is HTML. In case you still
care about Java, then your future should be Apache HTML/Java API!


Personally, I feel if that is true, then why all the hodgepodge, and why
not just Electron which is already driving window creation and interacting
with the desktop? Then, why not wasm and a real type safe language, and not
TypeScript nor JS? Or maybe just VS Code plugins?

Why use the browser for all that if there is a desktop need? I mean, is it
just me, or does that all just feel wrong?

Look at how many resources the Slack and VS Code apps need just running a
few simple things, and they exist how they are, and are successful because
people want to use the desktop app, and not tabs in their browsers. Then
there are all the tricks to access the file system indirectly.

I don't see the desktop app disappearing for specific types of
applications, and IMO that includes IDEs. Who wants to do all that work in
browser tabs? Nobody. Electron is a desktop app environment. It isn't a
container or a browser bound environment even if a browser is a component.

So what is the benefit of doing away with better rendering pipelines and
direct resource access just to wind up manipulating a slow and bloated DOM
in its place? Folks should checkout things Sean Phillips is doing with Java
FX inside NB RCP Swing.

I think IntelliJ shows that a successful Swing based product can be a
winner just as NetBeans has, and doesn't seem to be slowing down nor
changing directions. To me it seems more feasible to support Swing itself
for our needs, and continue making NB and NB RCP unique if we can be
involved. Otherwise, isn't it VS Code or Eclipse Che ideas, just far behind?

Wade

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