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> Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today. eh. Swing in its golden age run circle around what we have now. Granted it's old tech now that we se

> Frontend tooling has never been better than it is today. eh. Swing in its golden age run circle around what we have now. Granted it's old tech now that we settled for in-browser delivery, but still: - look and feels could do theming you can only dream of with css variables/scss - serialize and restore gui states partially or whole, including listeners - value binding systems vue can only dream of - native scrollers everywhere you could style and listen to without the rendered complaining about passive handlers. - layout that didn't threw a fit about forced reflows - unhappy with the standard layouts? build your own one as needed - debug everything, including the actual render call that put an image where it is - works the same in all supported os browsers are an insufferable environment to work within compared to that, css is powerful and all but you get a system you can only work by inference, and were everything interferes with everything else by default, which works great to style a document and is a tragedy in an app with many reusable nested components.

doctor_eval 6y ago
Not to be mean, but I worked with Swing for ten years and it was absolute crap. Constantly dealing with resizing “collapsars”, GBLs, poor visual compatibility with the host OS, a fragile threading model and piles and piles of unfixed bugs and glitches was a nightmare. It might have worked if you had a specific end user environment but it was a PITA for anything else, and deployment was even harder. There are a few things I definitely miss from my 20 years as a Java dev, but the half assed and under funded Swing UI is not among them. Give me HTML+CSS+JS any time.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  well we're talking about the tooling, but point taken, swing wasn't perfect (totally grid bag 2007 short https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuLaxbFKAcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuLaxbFKAcc ) but it's not like it was that worse than flex bugs ( https://codepen.io/sandrosc/pen/YWQAQO https://codepen.io/sandrosc/pen/YWQAQO still does render differently in chrome than firefox - which one is wrong is immaterial)
- thu2111 6y ago
  Give me HTML+CSS+JS any time. Sure! And Chrome is superbly tested. But HTML/CSS/JS aren't anywhere near good enough to build GUIs of any complexity by themselves, so everyone layers tons of stuff on top. And then those ... those, people have plenty of complaints about too. But if they didn't use them those complaints would migrate to the underlying framework. I mean, Swing may have had a fragile threading model (not sure what you mean by that really), but HTML doesn't have one at all. Not great!
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    I agree with you 100%, and was really just addressing the “swing is awesome” statement in the GP. I’ll take HTML etc over Swing any day, but I’m sure there are nicer alternatives if your deployment environment is native, e.g. SwiftUI (which I have no experience with) There are plenty of things wrong with HTML & friends, await/async and webpack being my personal hair removers, but if we set that aside and just talk about the DOM as the API for the UI, it’s very robust, well documented and widely available. I don’t love it, but it works.
    - LoSboccacc 6y ago
      "swing tooling" thank you, don't misrepresent my argument.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    HTML was never meant for building apps. We took a square peg (document markup language) and jammed it into a round hole (app development.) Most of the problems and frustrations with web development go back to this. We've been using the wrong tool for the job for over 2 decades. Now it's everywhere and nobody knows any better. It's probably too late now.

doctor_eval 6y ago

Not to be mean, but I worked with Swing for ten years and it was absolute crap. Constantly dealing with resizing “collapsars”, GBLs, poor visual compatibility with the host OS, a fragile threading model and piles and piles of unfixed bugs and glitches was a nightmare. It might have worked if you had a specific end user environment but it was a PITA for anything else, and deployment was even harder. There are a few things I definitely miss from my 20 years as a Java dev, but the half assed and under funded Swing UI is not among them. Give me HTML+CSS+JS any time.

LoSboccacc 6y ago
well we're talking about the tooling, but point taken, swing wasn't perfect (totally grid bag 2007 short https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuLaxbFKAcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuLaxbFKAcc ) but it's not like it was that worse than flex bugs ( https://codepen.io/sandrosc/pen/YWQAQO https://codepen.io/sandrosc/pen/YWQAQO still does render differently in chrome than firefox - which one is wrong is immaterial)
thu2111 6y ago
Give me HTML+CSS+JS any time. Sure! And Chrome is superbly tested. But HTML/CSS/JS aren't anywhere near good enough to build GUIs of any complexity by themselves, so everyone layers tons of stuff on top. And then those ... those, people have plenty of complaints about too. But if they didn't use them those complaints would migrate to the underlying framework. I mean, Swing may have had a fragile threading model (not sure what you mean by that really), but HTML doesn't have one at all. Not great!
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  I agree with you 100%, and was really just addressing the “swing is awesome” statement in the GP. I’ll take HTML etc over Swing any day, but I’m sure there are nicer alternatives if your deployment environment is native, e.g. SwiftUI (which I have no experience with) There are plenty of things wrong with HTML & friends, await/async and webpack being my personal hair removers, but if we set that aside and just talk about the DOM as the API for the UI, it’s very robust, well documented and widely available. I don’t love it, but it works.
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    "swing tooling" thank you, don't misrepresent my argument.
- icedchai 6y ago
  HTML was never meant for building apps. We took a square peg (document markup language) and jammed it into a round hole (app development.) Most of the problems and frustrations with web development go back to this. We've been using the wrong tool for the job for over 2 decades. Now it's everywhere and nobody knows any better. It's probably too late now.