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Comment by cpburns2009 | Hacker News Reader

cpburns2009

> Nobody cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies.

Clearly Java never existed. I've been experimenting with Swing lately because Java has a library I'm interested in using. It's a breath of fresh air compared HTML/CSS/JS. It may not be proper "native" development, but I don't have to deal with <div> hell. It has proper layout management instead of, what, 4 quirky CSS layout styles: float, table-, flex-, and now grid-. Sure if you want to hack something together, Electron may be quicker short term. But I question if it will actually be cheaper in the long run for non-trivial applications.

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> It may not be proper "native" development, but I don't have to deal with <div> hell. It has proper layout management

If you want something that's much closer to proper native, have a look at SWT. It's faster than Swing and actually looks/feels native since it's actually using native widgets. It's really a shame that the poster child application, Eclipse, is so bloated and slow, because people attribute that slowness to SWT when it's really primarily the plugin architecture that's responsible. And I actually find the more spartan developer interface to be more pleasant than Swing, so to me it's win-win. Swing will always have an uncanny valley, SWT has never had that issue, yet still allows you to write for the desktop in only Java.

I agree. I've been developing Swing and SWT applications for 15 years. SWT has a simple, lightweight API that just works. Swing is so bloated an complicated that you will be tearing your hair out to perform simple tasks.

I feel that Sun's choice of Swing was the main reason Java failed on the desktop.

Thanks for the tip. I'll have to look into SWT. I only chose Swing because it was included by default, but I would prefer to have the actual native look on each OS.

Layout management: I do wonder sometimes how much awareness the HTML/CSS/JS community has about how layout management is handled in things like Java's Swing or Apple's Auto Layout - or do people think that "desktop style" UI layout management is the "old way of doing things", and obviously HTML/CSS/JS is much more modern and therefore must be better?

I don't think it is better, to be honest, and so I also wonder why people aren't crying out for decent layout management for the web - is it just lack of awareness of how good things could be, or...?

> I also wonder why people aren't crying out for decent layout management for the web

They have been, and that's why today there are things like flexbox[0] and grid layout[1]. It just took a long time for the browser vendors/standards bodies to be convinced and then spec these things out to work within the confines of the existing layout models.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Flexibl...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_La...

Can't help thinking that Visual Basic had a better layout manager than CSS. I hate fixing CSS issues with a passion. I watch a designer whip up something in Illustrator and can't help thinking that CSS & HTML are a primitive way to do layouts.

Smalltalk had a GUI based approach to design in the 70s on a 2 mb disk, and most web layout is generating html & css, then tweaking that stuff. It doesn't feel like web layout is a progression.

Interestingly, Visual Basic did it all with absolute (pixel-by-pixel) positioning. Some (not all, but some) of the issue is that we have moved forward in what we expect out of UIs. (The rest, of course, is that the Web front-end is a shitshow of epic proportions)

The largest barrier to good layout on the web is that you can't measure text. All you can do is measure a node that has a specific text, which takes a long time and includes a reflow, which means either a) abysmal performance, or b) an entirely async layout algorithm, which would be much more complicated.

Java isn't new and shiny anymore. Having been around for the great Java hype of the 90s, it's crazy that Javascript has now replaced it. Nobody would have predicted that back then.

Javascript, Java, it's all the same after all ducks

I really hate Netscape & Sun for causing that confusion, and making Javascript look like Java on the surface, particularly as it obscured the prototypal model of JS and made anonymous functions clunky until the arrow functions of ES6. But it was good marketing.

If, instead of Swing, you use JavaFx (which comes included with Java) your UI will look nicer. It even has an embedded Webkit browser that can easily interact with JVM code. This means you can program your UI in any HTML/CSS/JS framework you want, and any other logic in any JVM language (Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon, Frege, etc.)

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