Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Swing is easy, but Swing is hard
This is in response to mellia's comment and I felt deserved an entire new posting.
One of the biggest complainants about Swing is that it is too hard. I believe this is because people expect Swing to be some kind of RAD GUI building tools some other "high level" languages. After all, so many other things are easy in Java. But Swing is no RAD tool, it was meant to be a full featured API. If you think Swing is hard then try to making a desktop app using C/C++ and the Motif library and then make it run on Windows too, now that would be tedious. That is really what Swing was trying to improve upon.
If you are looking for tools to help with saving time building Swing apps, I really y like Netbeans Matisse. It is the first Swing GUI builder that I ever really liked.
And yes you can use Swing to build "real" apps. Netbeans is an example.
One of the biggest complainants about Swing is that it is too hard. I believe this is because people expect Swing to be some kind of RAD GUI building tools some other "high level" languages. After all, so many other things are easy in Java. But Swing is no RAD tool, it was meant to be a full featured API. If you think Swing is hard then try to making a desktop app using C/C++ and the Motif library and then make it run on Windows too, now that would be tedious. That is really what Swing was trying to improve upon.
If you are looking for tools to help with saving time building Swing apps, I really y like Netbeans Matisse. It is the first Swing GUI builder that I ever really liked.
And yes you can use Swing to build "real" apps. Netbeans is an example.
