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Ask HN: Java widget toolkits?

2 points by kunai 14y ago

Hello everyone, First, a little background. I'm currently developing an application to help students write essays. It was a bit of a selfish endeavour as I wanted a free app to outline my essays with and I couldn't find any, so I decided to write my own. Currently I'm using awt and Swing, but the problem is that the widget library seems too limited to do anything more advanced than what I'm currently doing. The lack of fully native widgets also throws the polish off a bit; and the native L&F with Swing still isn't as fully "native" as it should be. Should I continue using Swing merely because it's easier to work with? Or should I switch to GTK+ or Qt for a better and more comprehensive experience? Maybe I should just ditch Java and switch to Objective-C or C++. Thoughts?

dougk16 14y ago
If you're open to the idea of targeting HTML5, either for the web or embedded in an app, I'd recommend http://www.sencha.com/products/gxt/ http://www.sencha.com/products/gxt/. This is built on top of GWT, which is basically a Java->JS compiler and which has its own widget library. You can try GWT's own widgets, but I found them very limiting and frustrating.