As a vendor of third party controls it's finally time for a feedback. We
create look and feels and controls mainly for Swing/JavaFX desktop
business applications. For us the most important things are:
* Bugfixing - and we've already reported a lot over the past years
* Rock solid base controls
* An extendable API
* Behavior API
Because of the API, in Java 9 for some methods the visibility changed
from protected to package local - in conjunction with JPMS it's pretty
hard to find proper workarounds. Some of our FX controls are pretty
sophisticated (e.g. our Table control) but all the open bugs makes
further work pretty expensive simply because it slows development
extremely down. Even if we noticed some higher activity in bug fixing,
many open bugs are moved from one release to the next without getting
fixed. Another big issue is the bug fixing latency - when we post a bug
today it will be possibly fixed in Java 11 or later. For us this means a
new product feature can't be tested and released before Java 11 - time
goes by and in the meantime other technologies win.
Johan, JavaFX is much more popular on Google Trends now than Swing
because some of you guys praised JavaFX as the "successor of Swing" and
often followed the "Swing is dead" mantra. If you are looking for a
competitor you should take a look at web technologies or other non-Java
products. IMHO Swing is *not* a competitor it's simply the older
brother. Anyway, this doesn't matter in this discussion. For us creating
complex JavaFX controls is more complicated than in Swing - not because
of JavaFX itself, it's mainly because the JavaFX API is currently too
restricted (way too many final and package-only visible methods).
We've already invested thousands of bucks in JavaFX development without
any ROI. Not a problem at all but at some point this is quite
frustrating. And we are far away from seeing a huge interest in JavaFX
business products. BTW: Any number of downloads can be misleading if you
know nothing about the user base - business, education, hobby, bot...
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers Wolfgang,
CEO of Jyloo Software
Germany
