You should give JavaFX a shot. It's not considered cool here, but does the job well IMO. I have built desktop apps that work seamlessly between MacOS, Windows and Linux using JavaFX with minimal pain. I was already quite familiar with Java and the Java way of doing things though. That probably helps.
For the people having apprehension around Java’s performance, let me tell you that my 12-inch MacBook with a mobile CPU managed to run IntelliJ IDEA just fine (a heavy Java-based IDE) but significantly struggles with Microsoft Teams (Electron-based chat client).
Yeah. Java's default performance isn't bad, and the floor is quite good (lots of space to optimize if needed). Just avoid bloating it up with enterprise framework when you don't need them.
JavaFX doesn't seem as snappy as native OS GUI frameworks, but I've found it very nice to develop for. It comes with reactive model out of the box, and there are some extra libraries that take it up to 11.
I recently finished a project in JavaFX and am looking to build another application. I've been unsure of whether to continue using Java or use native widgets.
I'm very comfortable with Java, but one of the issues I've had is the size of the resulting binary with the JRE included (it's possible to not include a JRE of course, but it's much easier to have it bundled from a user perspective). You can use jlink to reduce the size of the bundled JRE so that it only includes relevant modules, but does it actually reduce the binary size by a significant amount?
Also, JavaFX doesn't seem to have backing from larger organizations like Electron does. Are there any well-known apps created with JavaFX. I know IntelliJ was created with Java but using Swing if I recall correctly.
I ship a JavaFX app build with jlink. It includes many JDK modules beyond JavaFX, like `javafx.swing` and `jdk.unsupported` in order to access some features that unfortunately are not available in the standard modules, but even then the download size (zipped) is around 35MB, more like 65MB unzipped.
I would say that's pretty acceptable for a real app.
