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>Swing and JavaFX can be quite usable, but require a bit of graphics programming skills By this, do you mean skills with computer graphics programming versus G

by vram22 9y ago

>Swing and JavaFX can be quite usable, but require a bit of graphics programming skills By this, do you mean skills with computer graphics programming versus GUI programming? As in things like double-buffering, BitBLT, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_blit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_blit And if so, why are those needed for Swing and JavaFX?

pjmlp 9y ago
A bit, yes. Like in any GUI toolkit, one needs to have the taste and knowledge how to make into reality the wishes of a designer, or be a designer themselves. On Swing's case taking the effort of reading books like "Filthy Rich Clients" and "Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs". http://filthyrichclients.org/ http://filthyrichclients.org/ https://joshondesign.com/c/writings https://joshondesign.com/c/writings And be aware of cool 3rd party components like http://www.jgoodies.com/ http://www.jgoodies.com/ The biggest problem with Swing is that Sun wasn't that good understanding the desktop, so although Swing is quite capable it has lousy defaults, like requiring the native look and feel to be explicitly configured, or making it too easy to run everything on the main thread. On JavaFX's case, it is easier to use, but similar to using QML, XAML or the Web. Following blogs like FX Experience http://fxexperience.com/ http://fxexperience.com/ helps discovering cool components. For those that care about UI/UX, GUI programming is graphics programming. There is only so much that the default controls can do in any toolkit, extending them, customizing how they behave, or even creating them from scratch requires knowledge of graphics programming, because in the end you are putting pixels into the screen.
- vram22 9y ago
  Thanks for the detailed answer; very interesting info. I had done a bit of Win32 GUI programming much earlier (I mean in C, had also done some VB and Delphi work), and had read some books about it. I remember reading about owner-drawn controls, etc. Good stuff.

by vram22 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago

A bit, yes. Like in any GUI toolkit, one needs to have the taste and knowledge how to make into reality the wishes of a designer, or be a designer themselves. On Swing's case taking the effort of reading books like "Filthy Rich Clients" and "Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs". http://filthyrichclients.org/ http://filthyrichclients.org/ https://joshondesign.com/c/writings https://joshondesign.com/c/writings And be aware of cool 3rd party components like http://www.jgoodies.com/ http://www.jgoodies.com/ The biggest problem with Swing is that Sun wasn't that good understanding the desktop, so although Swing is quite capable it has lousy defaults, like requiring the native look and feel to be explicitly configured, or making it too easy to run everything on the main thread. On JavaFX's case, it is easier to use, but similar to using QML, XAML or the Web. Following blogs like FX Experience http://fxexperience.com/ http://fxexperience.com/ helps discovering cool components. For those that care about UI/UX, GUI programming is graphics programming. There is only so much that the default controls can do in any toolkit, extending them, customizing how they behave, or even creating them from scratch requires knowledge of graphics programming, because in the end you are putting pixels into the screen.

vram22 9y ago
Thanks for the detailed answer; very interesting info. I had done a bit of Win32 GUI programming much earlier (I mean in C, had also done some VB and Delphi work), and had read some books about it. I remember reading about owner-drawn controls, etc. Good stuff.