I've been coding Java since 1.2, mainly UI. 20 years we built a really complex control system visualizing thousands of graphical states on six monitors on a Pentium, quietly ticking away at 20% CPU usage... all in Swing. Which I still find very impressive.
Swing suffered from two central weaknesses: the tutorials provided by Oracle were... often insufficient. And you could pick up some bad habits by following them. And then there were the UI builders where anybody could draw up something mediocre.
Real strength were the lightweight components where you could about change everything in your Look&Feel. Hexagonal radiobuttons? No problem. Want the drop down button of that combobox a bit larger? There you go.
SWT... wouldn't really categorize that as an UI toolkit. SWT is mainly driven by eclipse, not developed independently. All controls commonly used by eclipse run reasonably well. Using anything else, especially cross platform is risky. 2D graphics is especially slow. So it's only a reasonable choice if you want to build something that looks and behaves like eclipse. There's some styling of components via CSS, but it's not complete...
"Swing suffered from two central weaknesses: the tutorials provided by Oracle were... often insufficient. And you could pick up some bad habits by following them. And then there were the UI builders where anybody could draw up something mediocre."
Agreed. Also, the IDEs would typically give you too much rope - enough for a novice to hang himself. When you create a new project with Xcode, you get a default project with all of the essentials for a native app. The menus, a window, an "About" window. Etc. In most java IDEs you get an empty main() method. Making an app that feels like a first-class citizen requires a lot of work and attention to detail.
Once inherited a 2D graphic editor... so slow it was totally useless. After tinkering a bit I noticed coordinates were sometimes 'long', sometimes 'Long'... gazillions of automatic boxing and unboxing operations resulted in a severe performance penalty. But the original developer didn't figure this out, tried to fix the problem by adding some multithreading on top... and of course botching it.
Introduced some sensible data types, got rid of the multithreading and it really got smooth...
I played with Swing a bit and really liked the control it provides. Is there any book that you recommend other than Filthy Rich Clients by Chet Haase to develop complex Swing application or to pick up good habits?
Is swing still developed and is there any reason I should pick JavaFX over Swing?
Funny you mention that. I co-wrote Swing Hacks for O’Reilly in 2005 and I still get about 50$ A year in royalties. So someone must still be writing Swing Apps.
Swing suffered from two central weaknesses: the tutorials provided by Oracle were... often insufficient. And you could pick up some bad habits by following them. And then there were the UI builders where anybody could draw up something mediocre.
Real strength were the lightweight components where you could about change everything in your Look&Feel. Hexagonal radiobuttons? No problem. Want the drop down button of that combobox a bit larger? There you go.
SWT... wouldn't really categorize that as an UI toolkit. SWT is mainly driven by eclipse, not developed independently. All controls commonly used by eclipse run reasonably well. Using anything else, especially cross platform is risky. 2D graphics is especially slow. So it's only a reasonable choice if you want to build something that looks and behaves like eclipse. There's some styling of components via CSS, but it's not complete...