Bryan Sant wrote:
Prior to NetBeans, Swing development has always been rediculously difficult to make something look good. However, NetBeans 6 (GPLv2) makes it a cake-walk. Take a look at these Netbeans demo videos below. It really is amazing what Sun has produced.
I am a big fan of the new Java IDEs. As big a Vim user as I am, I still use Eclipse for Java development. I'm glad to see that they're finally making a WYSIWYG form builder that doesn't suck (it's about time).
Not that I would ever get the chance, but I would wager that I could reproduce your guy's current app with Swing/Java in a few weeks and that it would run as fast or faster than your Qt/C++ version.
I highly doubt that. I have no data to back me up, but I highly doubt it. Having used many Swing apps, and having written several, I highly doubt it. These are not your average fill-in-the-form "CRUD" apps. We're talking near real-time hardware monitoring, with funky non-standard displays, etc. Some of our competitors use Java/Swing for their GUI development, and our customers consistently complain about how slow they feel. I realize this is just one example, but it's key for us. Recently our customers actually directed our competition to use Qt over Java because they are so happy with our Qt GUIs. It's pretty rare that one of our customers even *knows* what GUI toolkit is used for a product, let alone to direct a vendor to use one in particular.
The other show-stopper is that our customers often want to run a dozen Java apps (including some background services) independently. We're not talking about a bunch of apps in an app server, but stand-alone applications, each with their own JVM instance. Well, when each JVM allocates 128MB, that turns into a *lot* of memory. Plus, every Java app seems to want to ship its own version of the JVM, making the installs huge. With Qt, I statically link everything into my binaries (including the kitchen sink, but not libc), and our GUI installs have zero dependencies at a size of under 5MB.
There is one advantage to using Java for your development: There are so many libraries to do everything under the sun. It's really astounding to see the breadth of the libraries available to Java developers. The C++ library realm is lacking by comparison. Frankly, this surprises me, but it's true. And this is one thing that I miss, sometimes significantly.
The other area Java fits very well is where you control the deployment process in addition to the development process. This eliminates most of my complaints about Java's deployability, but if you have to "ship" it to customers where you don't control the installation process, it's more difficult.
I'm a big Qt fan. And python ain't too shabby either. I can understand why you're happy with your current setup.
Cool. I guess I dwelled a little much on the down-sides of Java, but at least you have a better picture of my rationale now. :)
--Dave /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
