I 've read a lot of discussions about Swing vs SWT/Jface. Yet, I have a particular need in mind and I wonder people with experiences here sould kind share your insights.
I'm planning to develop desktop application to integrate MS Office (Excel, Word, Outlook). Which technology I should choose: Swing or SWT/Jface?
many thanks.
What platform are you going to develop your desktop application on, and how much UI tweaking are you planning on doing? It is commonly argued on the internet that SWT and JFace are more suitable for quick out-of-the-box type UI development on the Eclipse platform because they work so well together (eg. JFace wizards, databinding and validation), whereas Swing is more suitable for enterprise level development in NetBeans that requires more UI customising:
http://www.ahmadsoft.org/articles/swingswt/swingswt.html
I have worked on UI applications written in SWT and JFace with Eclipse (which consume web services), and have found such things as the decorator framework to be quite useful. My applications require minimal user interaction, so SWT and JFace have minimized my development time quite nicely. I can see, though that if I scaled out my application to an enterprise level MVC design requiring richer interactions with users that using SWT and JFace may not be as suitable as using Swing.
Just my opinion!
Related
Since I'm familiar with AS3, I'm planning to build a desktop app using Air, and I'd like to not run into limitations, I never developed a full blown app for desktop using Air, only small apps and others for mobile.
The idea of this app is to be similar to an IDE, with some visual management, think of the design view of Flex, something like that. But not that big, a smaller/reduced version of that.
I'm asking this because I don't remember seeing any app like that built in Air, and I wonder if there is a good reason, or not.
If for example someone says: "use Java, its better", please tell me why, and more importantly, what things I can do in Java for desktop that Air just wont allow me to.
IMHO AIR is extremely powerful and if you combine Stage3D + Native Extensions you can do almost everything with a good performance. I have been working in several projects for desktop, iOS and Android and using Starling + Feathers + Robotlegs + creating my own native extensions (plus there is a lot of free/open source/commercial) was possible to achieve all my (and clients) goals.
Also, there is a huge (ActionScript/AIR) community sharing knowledge and helping each other, several open source frameworks (for games, 2D, 3D, animations, GUI).
I have tried Objective-C, Swift and Java and of course, there is a lot of positive points, native performance, powerful IDE's, GUI integration, native components, etc.
It's a mix, if you need to have your app running in multi platform, I believe Adobe AIR is a good option, if not and you have the necessary knowledge to work using Objective-C/Java, use native.
Of course, it's all relative, I'm just trying to share some tips.
I am looking for an alternative to swt for building the interface of an Eclipse plugin I want to develop.
Is it possible to build the interface of the plugin with JavaFX or HTML5 instead of swt ?.
I am targeting Eclipse Juno 4.2 or later.
Eclipse 4 defines an application model, i.e. a model of all the parts forming the application UI. The application model is decoupled from its presentation.
This means that different UI toolkits (SWT,XWT,JavaFX,etc.), can be used to implement the model. Theoretically you can build a UI using any presentation technology you want.
That said, Eclipse 4.2 (the IDE) still relies on good ol' SWT for it's UI. Which means, your plug-in will require some additional dependencies to be able to use a different toolkit.
e(fx)clipse (already mentioned by jewelsea), provides the necessary Eclipse tooling to build your plug-in. Among other things it plugs a JavaFX ViewPart plug-in template, which creates an example plug-in and adds the necessary bundle dependencies for you.
Imho, this would be your best bet.
There are lots of things going on, Eclipse versioning can be a bit confusing nowadays (at least for me), you can take a look at E4 but it is not widely used. It has the ability of desining UI with Eclipse RCP/CSS.
An other posibility is XWT. I've seen some business ready application using XWT so it seems to be mature enough. Even WindowBuilder can be used to build UI with XWT. Which is actually declarative UI constructing with XML. If you want to have only the OSGi "goodies" you can take a look at Apache Felix or Eclipse Virgo (Spring-powered). They are application servers based on OSGi so you can build module based enterprise applications.
Last but not least if you are OK with SWT/JFace but want to have web application, take a look at RAP. I have seen a full RCP application converted to RAP running in a regular browser.
I need to write a desktop app and its been a while since I started used Swing so will have a learning curve with either technology.
Are there any advantages in doing my app using JavaFX 2?
4 Years back I was having the same question and came to the conclusion that I would be best of using Swing since a lot of third party libraries were still written for Swing in those days. Also 1.0 releases from Sun were usually a bit rough around the edges (I burned myself on JSF 1.0 and JPA 1.0 :-).
Today a lot of libraries have JavaFX counterparts or are available as JavaFX library. That said there are also a lot of libraries wich are still Swing exclusive. Also I've done some small things with JavaFX 2.0 and it seems really complete. I haven't bumped into any showstoppers.
You need to check how many external UI libraries you are going to use besides Swing / JavaFX (and which one). If the answer is not many or a lot have a Java FX alternative (or are simple to todo yourself) I would definitly go for JavaFX. Also you can still use Swing components in JavaFX.
As stated JavaFX is going to deprecate Swing in the future and Oracle seems committed on JavaFX (it also going to be opensourced). So I would highly recommend JavaFX.
Status update 13 april 2014:
JavaFX has been opensource for some time now: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/OpenJFX/Main
The community is committed to JavaFX; JavaFX only libraries with no swing counterparts are starting to emerge.
Oracle has proven to be committed on JavaFX.
In case you weren't convinced 2 years back: JavaFX now definitely looks like the way to go. Though Swing will probably around for a long time it is currently in maintenance mode. It will take a lot of effort to port large applications (like IntellIJ or Netbeans) completely to JavaFX. And for those large applications such a large scale port is probably not worthwhile at the moment.
Status update 15 september 2021:
The JavaFX community is still going strong. OpenJFX is still there and has a flashier home.
Companies like Gluon (I'm not affiliated with them) offer commercial support LTS releases for OpenJFX.
There is GraalVM support for JavaFX allowing you to make JavaFX applications and distribute them as native binaries (ie. no JVM needed).
There are excellent opensource JavaFX component libraries available like TilesFX.
Both are good options:
If you want a rich, graphically enhanced application, the features of JavaFX 2.0 may be very appealing. It is designed to give you a lot of creative control over your user experience and visuals. Just be sure that it is supported on your target platforms....
If you want a standard desktop application that runs on as many platforms as possible, then Swing is probably a safer choice (since Swing is guaranteed to be available as part of all modern Java distributions). It also has the advantage of more mature 3rd party libraries.
Neither is likely to replace the other: they have slightly different target uses and will probably co-exist for many years to come.
We are looking at building a GUI application having the following attributes -
* approx 100 screens
* approx 200 users
* interfaces with 8 different legacy applications (protocols tbd but we are assuming web services will be exposed)
* has a separate data store for storing authentication and authorisation info along with few other information.
We are trying to avoid spending any money on procurement of physical servers, application servers etc.So we thought instead of building a web application , we could develop a standalone GUI based application that could be deployed on users' desktops considering that the users are less and the access to this application is confined to our organisation.
We were thinking of Java Swing as one of the options to consider. Is it a good choice? Please advice on the other options that we need to think about. We thought MS products would involving licensing costs to buy the product hence we are looking at developing the application using some free software tools.
Thanks a lot!
Regards,
V
I really like Swing and have written many applications with it, but I'm not sure the argument that you will get a cheaper solution because you have to procure less physical servers is a good reason for it.
There are other ways to use computational capacity on the client side. For example you could use SmartGWT. With a browser based solution you get easy deployment and have no problems with client-server communications (i.e. no proxy hell). It's possible to get all of this solved with a standalone GUI, but it requires experience and time (== money).
I think a standalone GUI is a good idea if you need a "rich" user experience and tight integration with the native environment. Web apps are generally less snappy and not so well integrated. If it's just about editing data on a server, the standalone GUI does not really have any advantages.
I won't rehash what we talked about in the comments. It seems you are focused on java gui solutions. With that said there are alternatives for developing gui applications with free tools. Just to name a couple, you could develop your client with Adobe Flex or Adobe Air, use python, php or ruby and GTK, or develop a windows GUI app using c# if your target os is windows. Similar to Air, Microsoft Silverlight is an option. Java is not the only solution.
Many Java gui apps are written using swing. The major competitor to Swing has long been SWT which is used for eclipse and by IBM. Javafx is a newer/alternative platform Sun/Oracle is behind, you should also look at. To be complete, you should also take a look at qt jambi that lets you develop in java against the Qt framework.
I don't have a lot of experience developing web-based data entry software, but comparative to Oracle Forms, Visual Studio, and various 4th generation languages, creating the user interface layout used to be a snap.
It seemsl ike these days, just creating the user interface for developing web applications is a huge pain in the butt. Just trying to get your text entry fields and widgets to go where they are supposed to is extremely painful, and requires you to know JavaScript, CSS, jQuery, HTML, etc. There has to be an easier way to develop data entry forms that produce the needed, underlying code for a webpage.
Am I just not looking in the right place? It seems like there must be some kind of WYSIWYG GUI development tools out there for developing data-entry forms.
Can anyone give me some good suggestions?
C# used with ASP.NET is strong in this area, but there is a learning curve to overcome. You can get the free versions by downloading the latest Visual Studio Express from Microsoft. The catch is that you are stuck with Windows for development, for better or worse. Visual Studio only runs on Windows.
Most web frameworks handle form generation for you. If yours doesn't then there are easily a dozen others that you can pick up for no money.
Dreamweaver. That's about the best WYSIWYG you're going to find.
http://www.sencha.com/ Ext JS is a Cross-browser JavaScript framework for rich web apps.
it also has a gui to create the interfaces. That gui app is not free.