One of the most important things for my choice for java GUI work is richness of the components/widgets. Pivot has a good selection, but there are a number of JIRA tickets suggesting improvements which I would like to see.
The creation of a brand new component would probably be a fairly daunting task for a new Pivot user, so the more that are available out of the box, the better IMHO. In addition to the quantity they should be as configurable as possible. My only previous experience with writing java GUIs was with (the sorely missed!) Thinlet. These were mainly for my own use and were hacked together as needed when time allowed. Because of that I can't really comment on original question, but with my circumstances I doubt I would have considered using both Pivot and Thinlet together if it was an option. I appreciate the benefits making Pivot more accessible to Swing developers, but don't have the experience with the theme/L&F side of Pivot to be understand the effort involved. If you feel it is doable without adding a lot of additional complexity or maintenance issues, then I don't see the harm. Chris On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Greg Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > The competitive landscape is most definitely broader than just > Swing/JavaFX. I doubt that Pivot will appeal to .NET users, but Flex and GWT > developers are certainly also in Pivot's target market. > > On Aug 2, 2010, at 9:57 PM, aappddeevv wrote: > > > Do you think that if someone has to move from Swing to JavaFX, that the > > decision will then become bigger--does the entire UI stack come under > > scrutiny? E.g. if I have to have to move from Swing, perhaps I should > > consider a wider variety of toolkits other than JavaFX? If so, the > > competition is bigger than swingers and the migration benefits story may > > need to be different because component reuse may not be the key factor > and > > reskilling may not be critical. > > > > I don't know the answer. Most likely new pivot developers have a swing > > background but I am not sure there is a linkage beyond that. > > > > If integrating somewhat with swing brings a wider variety of components > > available, that does not seem so bad. > > > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Greg Brown [mailto:[email protected]] > > Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 1:58 PM > > To: [email protected] > > Cc: [email protected] > > Subject: Re: [RFC] Swing interop features > > > > Yeah, writing a L&F is not a trivial task. But it is doable, and may be > > worthwhile if it helps attract new developers. > > > > My primary goal in improving Swing support is to give developers another > > reason to consider Pivot over JavaFX, which apparently doesn't provide > any > > migration path from Swing. Swing developers constitute a large percentage > of > > Pivot's target audience, so making it easier for them to switch to Pivot > > seems like a good idea. > > > > Anyone else want to comment? > > > > > > On Aug 2, 2010, at 10:09 AM, Noel Grandin wrote: > > > >> Greg Brown wrote: > >>>> Visual consistency is a double edged sword. If things are obviously > > different, people live with it, but once you start > >>>> down the road towards consistency, users will get pickier and pickier. > >>> My idea was to back the L&F with the actual Terra skins, so in theory > > they should look exactly the same. > >>> > >> Sounds like a good idea. But quite a lot of work. The Swing skin class > > code is pretty messy inside. > >>>> I would rather we simply focussed on improving the Pivot L&F - for > > example, the default fonts are completely wrong on my > >>>> desktop. > >>> Can you elaborate? The default font is Verdana, which (IMO) looks > pretty > > good across all platforms. What font would you prefer to use? > >>> > >>> What other suggestions do you have for improving Terra? The feedback I > > have gotten recently is that the current L&F is actually pretty good. > >>> > >> The font size is wrong. We run a lot of large screens at high resolution > > resolution here, so it's not uncommon for the > >> font size to be non-default. > >> > >> Pivot in general looks pretty good by itself, but because it doesn't use > > the default system font, and it doesn't use it > >> at the correct size, it tends to be the odd one out when used in > > conjunction with other stuff. > > > >
