Havoc's definitely correct

Weblog:		O'Reilly Editors Debate "Havoc Pennington rant at Sun's strange strategy"
Subject:		Havoc's definitely correct
Date:		2004-03-08 18:03:16
From:		elanthis

First off, it has less to do with the app being in Swing than the fact that there are two apps. We don't need two different apps. Nobody wants two different apps. Third party support technicians and plugin vendors don't want to deal with two apps. Etc. It's needless duplication of technology not only on the UI side (GTK vs Swing), but the extension API and entire user experience. Second, on the face of Swing being portable, that's really quite worthless to anyone but "rapid" UI developers. Users hate multi-platform UIs, because they invariably look, feel, and act foreign. Your Swing app may be a great Windows app, but the behaviour of widgets, design choices, layouts, etc will be totally alien on GNOME or OS X. It results in an app that feels like a giant hairy wart on otherwise excellently consistent and well designed platforms. We don't even need to mention the lack of integration with platform specific technologies like the VFS layer, file formatting (extensions on Windows/Linux vs attributes on OS X) and so on. If you want a proper cross platform app, the real solution is to take a solution like Abiword's. Abstract the GUI from the app, and then write platform specific versions for Windows, GNOME (Java-GNOME bindings), and Cocoa. You can even include a Swing front-end for those "other" platforms. This way, each front-end can look, act, and feel correct for the platform they're running on, versus copying OpenOffice's or Mozilla's mistakes where the app either only feels right on one platform (OpenOffice/Windows) or feels like an odd-ball on ll platforms (Mozilla).

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Updating Swing biases
2004-03-09 08:59:18 Daniel H. Steinberg | [Reply | View]

I must disagree strongly with your second point that "on the face of Swing being portable, that's really quite worthless to anyone but "rapid" UI developers. Users *hate* multi-platform UIs, because they invariably look, feel, and act foreign. Your Swing app may be a great Windows app, but the behaviour of widgets, design choices, layouts, etc will be totally alien on GNOME or OS X. It results in an app that feels like a giant hairy wart on otherwise excellently consistent and well designed platforms."

This need not be the case at all. You can easily customize your Swing app to behave like a nearly native application. For example, on Mac OS X the menu bar can appear in the appropriate place at the top of the screen while remaining at the top of the document window. You can create your UI in such a way that the menu item is "Quit" on a Mac and "Exit" on Windows with the expected accelerator keys set correctly for each platform. You can interact with native libraries and widgets. You can have the installation experience be correct on both platforms.

Of course, there are still issues that need resolving, but it is a shame to see these early views of Swing persist. We've come quite a ways since the early days of "Swing is slow" or "Swing is ugly". I've written articles on this for O'Reilly's MacDevcenter and for java.sun.com and Joshua Marinacci has, more recently, written a nice series on making your Swing apps feel more native for java.net. The point is that you can write a single codebase that runs nicely on many platforms but that you will have to add code that addresses the needs of these platforms.

Daniel Steinberg, editor
ONJava.com and java.net

Havoc's definitely correct
2004-03-09 02:14:40 khakipuce [Reply | View]

Whilst I agree in part about the look and feel issues (although swing offers 3 different look and feels which are dynamically selectable to address some of the objections), I suspect this is part of a strategy to complete open office with a decent groupware type app.

That said they may be better off doing a deal with IBM to open up Lotus Notes for this purpose.

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