Some OSS examples:
http://www.sweethome3d.com - This one has been the one app I've recommended to people outside the tech bubble! It also focuses on graphics and 3d.. really deserves to be showed off more often
What they have in common is that they are old project - often more than 10 years old and are not on Github. Goes to show how important hype and trendiness is in our industry.
edit: fixed formatting
Have you ever used the merge tools? So dang cool.
I have it configured as my git mergetool
The only problem is it takes absolutely ages to start up, which is maybe a JVM thing
I wish there was a way to have git pass all of the conflicting files in a merge to the mergetool at once. Instead of having to wait for JetBrains to load up for each individual file and close after each one :(
How are you doing this? I haven't seen any merge tool, let alone a standalone one, in the JetBrains toolbox. What am I missing?
IDEA is slow(ish) to start because it's an IDE so it's loading tons of plugins, a project database etc. Though actually recent versions only take a few seconds on my admittedly high end MacBook.
TBH I never got on with PyCharm and still use Sublime Text... but I keep PyCharm installed just for the mergetool!
If the JVM based apps do not yield a significant performance benefit then there is no point in going after that.
Through tbh. I don't see much reason to spend time for a Java UI framework, Java for desktop is just kinda annoying and somewhat even more dead then Java for servers (which isn't really dead tbh).
Through I guess idea/Intellij would love to replace the low level parts with something which works more reliable.
Also I don't think the desktop app market for java is small in any way. But if there's no difference between electron and JVM UIs then there is no incentive for teams to switch.
>The second is the DOM. It is a horrible collection of hacks that make simple things hard and hard things impossible. I have thought many times “if only was I drawing this control/layout directly, I would’ve finished hours ago.”
As a user of electron apps there are clearly limitations on what the UI can do as a result and the style of rendering it is clearly webish.
Another issue I keep on seeing with web based apps, moreso on android, is they seem utterly incapable of dealing with the slightest network non-connectivity. The UI tends to freeze.
I do take your point entirely on the fact that perhaps java's inherent performance limitations might result in a fairly comparable poor experience however.
I.e. the amount of UI problems you have with it when using a tiling wm or wayland (or both) are just sad and make it unusable. Other widely used UI's might also have problems but at least are somewhat usable under wayland and/or tiling wm.
Ironically many of this problems go back/are rooted in to AWT...
In the past Intellij did work if started directly by x (without a wm) which was pretty cool for some very very neach use cases, but sadly (through reasonably) this isn't the case anymore.
Especially the quick command/search menues doesn't work at all and context menues sometimes don't work either.
(Edit: And context/popup menues not working is the main theme of problems with Java GUIs, hence my parent post, also setting the "magic" no-reparenting env variable doesn't fix it)
If the UI toolkit can't get a button right, it is completely broken IMO. Even including intelliJ products, I have never used a Java GUI which was good.
Part of them because i didn't fully understand Swing when i began the project and partly because synchronizing GUI's to another live process is a quite error prone task.
A debugger process is almost certainly not living in the same thread as the Swing UI of IDEA so this almost surely more of a thread synchroniztion issue rather than Swing issue. (You really don't watch to do any cross-thread touching with Swing apart from for a very limited set of components built for this).
In intelliJ it was like whenever the UI was not immediately responding to mouse events, it would often just lose the event instead of it being correctly processed once the UI thread was freed up.
In the case of IntelliJ there is probably some of their code accepting the event and then probably has some ad-hoc message passing by setting a field that is polled by the receiver thread under the assumption that the receiver always runs faster than a human can act, however as soon as that assumption is broken by some pause you get what you describe.
OK - it's loading so that's not unexpected. However my previous experience was that the same thing would happen to the UI at all sorts of surprising moments when other processes were ongoing, such as linting or using the debugger. Kind of hard to reproduce without a large project at hand though.
Then I had to stop testing and SIGKILL it because the whole application got into an infinite loop of NPEs in the UI event loop of all places!
I too experienced using intelliJ for many years and this seems largely in line with what I remember.
In fact VSCode starts faster.
A text editor that can be extended vs a platform application is the same argument we've been having about vim vs emacs for years.
DBeaver is an incredibly powerful application that had allowed me to work in Postgres, Teradata, and Oracle databases for years. Could I do the same kind of work in VSCode? Absolutely not, unless I wanted to build out an entirely new interface on top of VSCode. By the time that work is done it could be equally slow to start up. DBeaver has an absolutely massive feature set tailored for database work and it has to load all those plugins at some point.
Another counter point is VSCode with java-lsp could never handle the 300k loc code base we developed on, where intelij and eclipse do just fine. Yes, they startup slowly, but at least they provided meaningful and fast autocomplete without the need to wait for the language sever or VScode to unfreeze.
Again these are purely anecdote, but please don't purely judge an application by it's startup time if it saves you time in the end.
I also think the optimizations for high performance with a relatively small amount of data are fundamentally different than the optimizations for high performance with a very large amount of data, I have not really seen any GUI approach that scales smoothly from small amounts of data to large amounts of data without some complexity on the back-end
> There are lots of fast, usable JVM gui applications.
I used VSCode as an example because it's touted as the fastest electron app.
Now I have no idea how to benchmark DBeaver once it's running but since my use case is to launch it once in while to run a quick SQL query, startup time is important for me.
For years I have said I need a kind of SQL pad: a native app, that launches ultra fast, directly shows me the tables once connected (hide all the complexity of the DB) and let me run some SQL immediately. I guess I'll probably have to scratch my own itch once I find the time.
[1]https://github.com/scgray/jsqsh [2]https://github.com/xo/usql
I generally use pgcli for talking to postgres, and I occasionally need sql developer for Oracle - but with Bk i might standardize on it for ms sql server, postgres and sqlite.
It's foss and electron. That it's snappier than sql developerto start isn't saying much... I guess.
https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/
https://github.com/beekeeper-studio/beekeeper-studio
I tried ms azure data studio or what it's called, and I think Beekeeper is a good alternative. It doesn't do all that sql server mgmt studio does - but then it also doesn't need to run in a windows vm..
me too :) I installed it but didn't connect to any DB yet. Startup time is certainly no better than DBeaver though.
Debatible, argueable.