Every time I start teaching my new Java class I’m looking at the Swing units in the manual asking myself, “Why my students need to know Swing framework?” Well, I need to teach them how to program GUI, event listeners, asynchronous worker threads and event loop that are pretty much the same in every programming language that deals with UI. My students create applets and test them in appletviewer, then they are going through hard times trying to run them in Web browsers… In the end, I tell them that they won’t be going doing Swing programming in the real world projects. I also tell them that if Amazon.com would decide to re-write their UI in Java they’d be out of business in no time.
If not with Swing framework, how should my Java students learn GUI programming? There is another Oracle product called JavaFX. It’s a better looking wrapper for Swing. It still runs on JVM, so Amazon would go out of business as quickly as with Swing, but at least with a better looking UI.
Java developers look down at the HTML/JavaScript crowd. Yes, programming in JavaScript is not as productive as in Java, but HTML5 applications usually look nice. HTML5 developers know that having a Web designer producing professionally looking CSS is a must. Whereas Swing components are ugly by default. They are so last century.
Recently I was attending a presentation on a particular Eclipse plugin that could produce Web reports. The speaker was using Twitter API to demonstrate how easy it was to generate a report finding tweets based on a certain hashtag. Tada….Report is generated, the Web browser opens the report’s URL and pops up the modal dialog asking to enter the search parameter. What an ugly dialog box that was! Eclipse grey style, 90% of its real estate was empty with an input field on top prompting to enter the parameter’s value. No one in the audience (all Java developers) seemed to care. They are all used to ugly GUI in enterprise applications. OK, this product was using RCP UI components, but the Swing ones are definitely not better.
The sooner Swing is deprecated the better. Even if JavaFX has no future in the Web or mobile applications, it has to become a mandatory replacement for Swing. Just because it promotes a better looking UI. Just because it promotes better taste among Java developers, who live in two different realities: the ugly depressive GUI at work and the eye candy world of iOS or Android applications. Let’s make a first step toward merging these worlds by killing Java Swing framework.