A friend of mine asked me if I could write him a small proggie for a stupid thing he needed. Didn't look harder than a few days of work and I had previous experience with both AWT and Swing so why not?
I asked another friend of mine for some additional pointers ... I wish I listened. Instead, I also looked at the official Java docs where I was informed of this new JavaFX thing which is good and awesome and The Only Real Thing You Need To Create SlickInterfaces.
Ok so I give it a go. Being the successor to Swing it must be at least just as good I suppose!
Not really. I think I haven't tasted this kind of pain in quite a while.
Perhaps I'm asking the impossible but... it seems to me those dudes are expecting us to just load & display images. No processing. Not even a way to pull out the pixels... unless you use previous components (goodbye to "the only thing you need" part of the joke). Maybe I'm asking too much?
Maybe that's just me but I think the API is just flat out broken. Or perhaps I'm messed up in the head... because it looks to me for rich sleek UIs like C.S.I. we would need at least a way to get our hands dirty with pixel juggling.
And I cannot quite get the emphasis on certain features. Look, you got a whopping 15 different widgets out of the box! And none includes a file selector, nor a color picker! Or perhaps I have just missed the whole point after two days going in circles on the docs? What the hell.

I'm now torn between

1. Tell him to bite the bullet himself
   
2. Go back to swing
   
3. Bite the bullet and go C# (goodbye to portability, but I'm fairly sure it won't be as retarded as the Java environment)!
   

Suggestions/Opinions?

A friend of mine asked me if I could write him a small proggie for a stupid thing he needed. Didn't look harder than a few days of work and I had previous experience with both AWT and Swing so why not?
I asked another friend of mine for some additional pointers ... I wish I listened. Instead, I also looked at the official Java docs where I was informed of this new JavaFX thing which is good and awesome and The Only Real Thing You Need To Create SlickInterfaces.
Ok so I give it a go. Being the successor to Swing it must be at least just as good I suppose!
Not really. I think I haven't tasted this kind of pain in quite a while.
Perhaps I'm asking the impossible but... it seems to me those dudes are expecting us to just load & display images. No processing. Not even a way to pull out the pixels... unless you use previous components (goodbye to "the only thing you need" part of the joke). Maybe I'm asking too much?
Maybe that's just me but I think the API is just flat out broken. Or perhaps I'm messed up in the head... because it looks to me for rich sleek UIs like C.S.I. we would need at least a way to get our hands dirty with pixel juggling.
And I cannot quite get the emphasis on certain features. Look, you got a whopping 15 different widgets out of the box! And none includes a file selector, nor a color picker! Or perhaps I have just missed the whole point after two days going in circles on the docs? What the hell.

I'm now torn between

1. Tell him to bite the bullet himself
   
2. Go back to swing
   
3. Bite the bullet and go C# (goodbye to portability, but I'm fairly sure it won't be as retarded as the Java environment)!
   

Suggestions/Opinions?

C# is pretty much as portable as Java these days, mono supports WinForms(2.0) and you can always use Gtk# if you prefer that.
You could also go with C++ and QT (only real drawback is that you have to use C++)

I only worked with Java FX a little bit, but they just revamped their code (making my books obsolete kinda) not too long ago. But it was good for what I needed it for, but I wouldnt say its a UI replacement just yet, atleast without getting your hands a little dirty yourself. I saw it more as an alternative to flash I havent played around with flash much myself since like 6, 7 years ago but It wasn't really for built primarily for UI experience.

C# is pretty much as portable as Java these days, mono supports WinForms(2.0) and you can always use Gtk# if you prefer that.
You could also go with C++ and QT (only real drawback is that you have to use C++)

Wow, that's really good news man. When you say "as portable as Java" are you considering mobiles as well? It's a while I've heard about mono but I never had the chance to look at it in detail so far.

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1341947336' post='4957733']C# is pretty much as portable as Java these days, mono supports WinForms(2.0) and you can always use Gtk# if you prefer that.
You could also go with C++ and QT (only real drawback is that you have to use C++)

Wow, that's really good news man. When you say "as portable as Java" are you considering mobiles as well? It's a while I've heard about mono but I never had the chance to look at it in detail so far.
[/quote]

Java doesn't really "work" with modern mobiles, (You got Java(Dalvik) on Android but it doesn't have Swing or JavaFX and uses a slightly different standard library and an extremely different application model (Android doesn't run desktop Java applications)). and for older mobiles you only got J2ME which again is different from normal desktop Java. (so not much portability to speak of)
For C# you got mono for iOS and Android but its not free ($400 for each platform(1 year of updates included) + $300 per year for further updates for the cheapest version) (This is used by Unity and is most likely the reason that they charge a bit for iOS and Android support even if you use the free version of Unity).

mobile crossplatform development is a bit of a mess really, the good options are fairly expensive.

This sucks really bad.