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Comment by unclebucknasty | Hacker News Reader

Funny to read this--talk about the benefits of strong-typing, etc. The dynamic nature of JS was once a benefit. Granted, it wasn't initially purposed for full-out browser facing SPAs, etc.

Still, strong-typing has been with us forever and, in general, I feel like we've solved this problem. I'd like to see a light-weight VM framework that supports Java code compiled down to JS, with an in-browser Swing-like component framework (no, not applets). But a lot of the tenents of async, event-driven Swing style dev (including using workers to keep i/o off the event thread), actually overlay nicely with the challenges that modern JS frameworks are attempting to solve.

I know there's not a lot of Java-love around here, but, pick any language that has modeled out this problem and has a cadre of seasoned developers. Then, rather than re-invent the wheel, just port that to the browser.

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It's funny: I'm not even a web developer by trade, and perhaps precisely because of that fact, every other day at least I have a conversation with a colleague that goes something like, "Wouldn't it be great if there were Swing for browsers?" The idea of pre-styled and easily laid-out widgets holds a great deal of appeal. Vue and Bootstrap come close to giving me that, but not quite.

Yeah, Swing is actually fun to write. Possibly because its paradigm is elegant and such a natural fit for the problem that you don't spend time fighting to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Shame it came with such an unwieldy deployment model that it never gained more traction.

For me personally, the biggest selling point is not having to evolve the skill set of design and layout. I'm a developer, not a designer, and the ROI on me learning the fine points of CSS is very low. I already know the bottom 80% of CSS, but who doesn't? It's the top 20% where the "magic" happens, as with so many things.

Pre-styled, if unremarkable componentry is what I need to deliver business outcomes. Bootstrap is made for people like me, but something like Swing would make it even easier.

Yeah, that's true. Devs spend too much time pixel-wrangling in the minutae of CSS.

But, for me, it's not just the styling, but the architecture and componentry for modeling out async, event-driven web apps in a more natural way. And, I think that's the piece you're referencing that Swing can add to Bootstrap-alone.

I would agree that the deep inheritance hierarchies in verbose OO environments like Java actually do make sense for UI work. I think that's the one area in which they actually do make sense. Otherwise, it's all mostly a fantastical contrivance that leads to far too much boilerplate.

Checkout Element [0], in my opinion it comes very near to a "Swing for browsers". There is a version for Vue.js and React.

[0] http://element.eleme.io/#/en-US

You can sort of do this with Emscripten + webasm, though I don't think async is supported yet.

Check Vaadin. Might suit your taste.

Just took a glance. Great tip. Looks promising. Thanks!

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