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Comment by szastamasta | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I thought that JavaFX is effectively dead, after it was removed from JDK. Haven’t seen any app made with it for ages.

But maybe now, that we have GraalVM Java will make a comeback to desktop?

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It has a very active community, nothing is dead when there are active users. It has been living as independent package for a long time https://openjfx.io

I wish Oracle did a better job for Java GUI, sigh. Java could be more lightweight than electronjs as a cross platform desktop GUI stack. Swing is the only one officially supported, but, it does not look that great on the screen.

I don't remember Java being any more lightweight than Electron. Both are super heavy, easily recognizable (because of there non-native nature and general subpar performance), have giant binaries/payloads. Especially Swing. Noone has ever complimented IntelliJ on its responsiveness... (IntelliJ is great nonetheless)

I have a JavaFX app in production that ships 40mb binaries, which includes the JRE, and can run with a 50mb heap, and I haven't optimized it yet.

You can try out the desktop version of JFXCentral via this installer https://downloads.hydraulic.dev/jfxcentral2/download.html

> Hmm, I thought that JavaFX is effectively dead, after it was removed from JDK

I remember reading that they were removing it from the JDK so it wasn't tied to Java release schedules, enabling them to have more frequent updates. Don't know how it worked though, but where I live I know, by reading job offers, that at least a couple of companies use it.

I made a somewhat trivial app in javafx, bellsoft JVM with native graalvm/javafx included and it was an ok experience. It definitely shows the community is small, but a lot of the key issues were solvable which makes me think a few larger communities putting love j to it could reply turn things around. Kinda like redhat dumping a ton of effort into python and is kits for redhat, etc.. the love really seemed to help that community in the times it was needed.

> I thought that JavaFX is effectively dead

what would be replacement?..

I just thought that people moved to Electron for cross-platform and to native otherwise. Java was not particularly fast nor native-looking on desktop. I’ve spent quite a few years in Swing, and am not sure it’s much better than Electron. But with GraalVM, maybe…

It really depends on the developers writing the application, but in my humble opinion Java and Swing are far better than Electron in terms of responsiveness to user interactions.

Java is unbeatable for "enterprise logic" though..

the primary java app I use is InteliJ suite and it seems as responsive/fast as any other app I use. Are they doing anything particularly unique?

IntelliJ is 20yo old app, with lots of resources invested, they likely have many non-trivial optimizations implemented and do not represent vanilla java experience.

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