Spending a couple of DAYS to make a table behave and look the way I want it is NOT COOL!
It should be way easier to make these GUIS going, as easy as HTML+CSS+JavaScript!
I'm a little worked up. Is a bile coming on? No just a rant. I posted the reply below to the thread. I figure I'll cross post it here.
I read the same client, rich client platform, Swing vs SWT posts over and over again. They remind me of the current political commercials. Half arguments and half truths. What I would love to know is why the desktop development scene with Java is evaluated differently?
1. "Web apps are so much easier than desktop development" ... The core interaction model with webapps is simplified so of course it is easier. You have a MVC pattern with a view technology that causes you to jump through hoops to get an acceptable interaction level. Before the entire web browser era users were used to having a rich client interaction level with their applications. I don't think using the browser as the client was a shift made because of a superior technology. It was a shift made because of because of deployment ease and the fact that most applications didn't and still don't need the bells and whistles a rich client platform can provide. Now we have a market that has come full circle. We have broadband and user demands of more interaction in some cases. You can't tell me that it is easier in these cases to create the type of application rich client users request with Javascript, CSS, and HTML. Swing, SWT, and other technologies were designed with this type of application in mind. Furthermore the reason people complain that "Swing
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or SWT is hard" is not that the api itself is hard. They simply now have to deal with things like sortable table columns, dynamically updating data, real time data validation across their application, etc. The requirements of a rich client application make the task harder not the technology. Their application scopes have changed. You can't just expect to fire up a wizard and have the application written for you. Why is the expectation at that level?
2. I will agree that we need better reusable components and frameworks. However, why with the client market do we simply gripe about it and do nothing? People realized early on with Servlet and Jsp technologies that some sort of order was still missing. How many MVC frameworks are there? I see a new one on TSS every day it seems like. In the client space we just say SWT this or Swing that. Saying they are inadequate is like saying Jsp and Servlets do a horrible job of supporting web apps.
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