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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Mostly because today, a Java application is either a back-end application or a dead-end project. Everything a user touches is either native or web, and you can't get proper UX if you skip steps and try to magically render a useful UI as a non-UI developer.

It used to be much more acceptable to have "any" UI, but today, if you can't make a generic bootstrap, tailwind or react based UI, you might as well stop and hand that task over to someone else.

Dojo (the JavaScript framework) and ExtJs essentially died the same death (yes, there are still UIs based on those, and the instantly feel like 2006) because of the same reasons, while being completely web-targeted; they tried to make a Swing/AWT/WinForms type of application design a "thing" for the web, which didn't really work out long-term. It was great while it lasted.

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The language you write an UI in, isn't directly connected to how it feels. There are plenty of old feeling web, native and mobile apps out there.

Some years ago I wrote a desktop app in JavaFX. This is a Java UI toolkit (though I wrote in Kotlin), but, you can style it with CSS. It was a piece of cake to give it a GitHub-ish feel. The result felt a lot like a web app, just without the browser chrome. The app in question was a peer to peer app that benefited from some libraries written in Java, so it was a good fit for what the app needed to do.

At the moment it's a bit painful to do this sort of thing because of a lack of good distribution tools. But, that's about to change ...

JavaFX was about to be revolutionary for over a decade ;-) First it was availability, then it was integration, then it was build tooling and now it's distribution.

Most of the Java-for-the-user only exists on Android and niche markets (like some financial software).

And while it's true that the language doesn't determine the UX, the different things I mentioned (frameworks, languages etc.) are mostly relevant due to the mindshare, adoption and general availability of up-to-date resources to get the job done.

I don't think JavaFX is revolutionary, it's just a nicely designed UI toolkit. There are lots of markets where software needs GUIs but doesn't actually benefit from anything the web provides, beyond the general inertia you mention.

The cold sweat comment wasn't referring to my abilities, but to the thought that actual enterprises use the horrific combination of terrifying garbage called Angular, React, TypeScript, JavaScript and the legion of tools needed to make them do anything comprehensibly close to intelligibly useful in this year, 2022.

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