Rob Ross
Posts: 1
Nickname: robross
Registered: Jul, 2008
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Re: Does Anyone Really Care About Desktop Java?
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Posted: Jul 19, 2008 4:28 AM
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The title was clearly designed to be provocative, presumably to increase the number of eyeballs viewing this article and thus increase ad revenue.
But that's a pretty standard technique in the publishing industry and has been for hundreds of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
You might have just as easily written "Does anyone really care about .NET any more?" and gotten a huge influx of irate .NET developers. Maybe next year you'll be writing "Has Flex failed on the Desktop?" and we can all watch the ironic hilarity ensue.
But I won't take it personally. I do find it amusing though.
Anyway I'm posting this to say that yes, *I* care about Java on the desktop. I spend the majority of my time writing desktop Java applications for internal use by my company. Many of them are quite impressive if I do say so myself. The users love them, and they're supporting mission-critical processes of the company. And you've never heard of these applications, nor of me, but hey, we exist!
Do any of the users know that these apps are written in Java, or even know what "Java" is? Magic 8-ball tells me "outcome unlikely."
I like Java, and I like the power that Swing and Java2D give me. I started my career long ago writing apps in 4GL environments like PowerBuilder, VB, 4th Dimension, etc. I soon became frustrated with the fact that these tools, although quite good at letting you quickly develop applications, did not easily allow one to go "outside" the pre-determined feature set of the UI widgets. That is, customizing applications beyond these environments' operating parameters was very difficult, time-consuming, and difficult to debug. And cross-platform development, something else that is important to me, was often impossible with these tools.
So when I first discovered Java and Swing I was instantly hooked and it felt like a huge barrier to creativity had been lifted. Sure, it took a while to get it stable, but since Java 1.4 I have had no major issues developing snappy, responsive, attractive and usable applications. I can literally design any GUI that anyone can think up, because if needed I can develop my own widgets based on primitive Java2D drawing operations. And I can deploy the same application on both Mac and Windows machines, with minimal platform-specific tweaking. But hey, feel free to show me another cross-platform desktop development environment with the standard library features and 3rd-party support of Java and the same flexible deployment options and that is open-source, and I will be happy to take a look at it.
By the way, I have never had a problem thinking of desktop Java as a primarily a tool for in-house corporate development. It can and has been used for commercial applications, but I think it really shines for in-house, cross-platform app development. But that's just my personal experience, I don't want denigrate anyone writing commercial apps.
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