On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 16:51, Casper Bang <[email protected]> wrote: > Yup, Mono has no trouble running Java code thanks to iKVM.
I have tried IKVM - for small things it looks to do the job perfectly. Tried to convert something with GUI and was not able until chosen exactly the layouts that are supported. Matisse free design for Swing is not... - to give an example. :-( IKVM looks great for several use cases, but I have not yet used it other than in proof-of-concept ways. On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 08:36, Vince O'Sullivan <[email protected]> wrote: > For me, Java's core weakness (the elephant in the > room) has been it's more or less complete inability to produce a user > interface that is anything other than pug-ugly. Although I know what you mean, I settled with Swing and got into distance from OS look and feel. There are plenty of other applications on Windows and Linux that try to offer a completely differnt look and feel (see different media players for example). You can try looking OS-like or you can try having the same look no matter where it is launched. I find the second fitting better to the Java idea and I think it includes less troubles. > stop gap that was soon replaced with the extraordinarily complex > Swing. I am faster in building a GUI in VB (not only due to longer experience - it's just simpler in architecture), but I have less issues in Swing (whoever has experience with form resizing in VB knows what I mean ;-) ). In swing, supporting different languages is a pleasure as labels (and all subsequent elements) automatically resize depending on the length of the label caption string - which can be quite different in different languages (English usually tends to be the shortest but is usually the first language being used when designing the GUI). So designing takes a little longer for me (because moving around widgets sometimes cause automatic completely rearranging of others), but the result is better. And NetBeans does also a quite good job in the meantime building clean code (without a bunch of anonymous classes as Eclipse Visual Editor does - or did? - didn't look back since quite a while). > That would have been fine if Swing was ever built upon and > developed but, like pretty much all the components of Java, version > 1.0 was added in and then abandoned. As a result, you need a degree > in computer science and ten years experience to get so much as a radio > button onto the screen in the right place, using Java. I can't follow you here - or are talking about automatic rearranging when moving around controls? If so, there is either absolute layout (I would say this is the most equivalent to Visual Studio GUI editors - but I don't like it because of poor alignment features and poor flexibiilty - therefore I prefer the "free design" layout. To get a radiobutton in the right place, I don't have much problems that way. > How many times does Steve Jobs have to say its all about the user > experience before anyone outside Apple notices? Java 7 isn't going to > help Java because it only adresses software developers' issues not > software users'. I would say, first of all - Swing file open/save dialogs - here is room for improvement - definitely. Also it was not so easy to get an autocomplete feature implemented which is known from quite a lot of javascript libraries available for web developers. But you overcame such initial hurdles, it flows, I would say. In general I think there are already a lot of Java applications that give quite good user experience on the desktop - I looked around not so long ago after somebody argumented with bad user experience - see http://it-tactics.blogspot.com/2010/07/java-applications-on-desktop.html On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 11:33, Carl Jokl <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't know if it helps to note that I found I could easily create > ugly UIs in .Net which had events and such. There are aspects of > the .Net windows forms library which are I could argue messier than > Java AWT or Swing. One example is that Java seems to have a very > standard set of events which are available on all components i.e. mouse events > and key events. There does not seem to be such a standard in Windows > Forms on .Net. And Microsoft recommends not to use Windows Forms any more, but use WPF instead. That said I have read about complaints that the WPF is not mature yet (which no wonder for me as Microsoft for everything needs until about version 3 to get it right - so I prefer a Swing v1.0 over .net forms v3.0 ;-) ). > Windows Forms on .Net is basically AWT style where the > components are just thin wrappers around native Win32 components. I would say the .net event handling is similar to VB. In fact when I was at .net conferences, mostly the C++ developers were excited but I often thought "mhm, I have that already in Classic VB". Anyway, I have evaluated that stuff and it would have been more logical for me to switch to .net but I have seen Java then and Swing and liked that more. So I don't really wonder about your discoveries... > Going back to the events, there was a need to fire something on either > a mouse down or key down (I can't remember exactly) event on a > ComboBox on .Net. The event required was not available so the only way > to do it was to tap into the native messages and respond to it there. mhm, I wonder, because such primary events should be there. I only remember, that I could not find out, how many times a user clicked. I mean, in Swing, I could do different things, whether the user clicked once, double or even tripple etc. - Guess how many new options I never had in old VB times. :-) > felt like Windows was just saying "I am sorry Dave I am afraid I can't > do that..." which is all the more confusing because my name isn't even > Dave. Oh, don't tell me you tried look-and-feel programming on .net? ;-) ASFAIK they don't have such options prior to WPF (if they have implemented as advertised)... > Then the amount of headache involved in shutting down a .Net > Windows Forms application which has multiple windows open seemed far > more of of a headache to get right than for a Swing / AWT application. If I remember right, there should be a collection of forms somewhere which just needs to be looped and unloaded. > It may be a matter of what I am used to. In Windows Forms things > tended not to execute the way I would have predicted. Well, that happened to me first also when doing my first Swing apps. But I got over it and now love it. > For all > this .Net is generally touted as being better for UI. I am not sure I > agree with this. This is, because the vast majority of the .net developers never have seen something else and they are used to pain. > Then we have Windows > Presentation Foundation. This seems to be a more Swing esque solution > where the library is handling drawing on top of a hardware accelerated > pipe rather than wrapping native components. The bits of information I > am hearing though imply that not many people are using WPF. I suppose > it has something of a niche in Silverlight (given that it is basically > the only option available). I heard, that people have still difficulties with WPF and therefore not using it - but could be that this has changed with version 4 of .net or so - honestly, I do not follow that much any more (that said I have a project in the pipeline, where I have to build a small .net plugin - keep my fingers crossed). > The Java platform has enough low level drawing control to create good > looking UIs. It is really a question of how easy it makes doing so. > Look and Feels never seem to have been a strong point though I have > seen some really good looking 3rd party ones. There are many nice look and feels. However to find one that not just looks cool but also uses colors and backgrounds everywhere that makes it easy to use is not always easy. Cool is not always functional... > Even Nimbus though a great > improvement over the old Look and Feels doesn't look exactly stunning > to me. Many like Substance: https://substance.dev.java.net/ > Is .Net considered to be a good UI choice because of always > having heavily pushed and designed around using a GUI creator? Maybe > that does make laying things out easier but I think it may make people > gloss over whether the actual UI classes are well designed because > many use the UI designer to the point they don't deal with these > classes directly anyway. It's probably also because of certification by Microsoft: Many big companies prefer officially certified software to be used on their Windows client boxes and to get that certification with a Java GUI is probably more difficult... -- Martin Wildam http://www.google.com/profiles/mwildam -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. 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