>I don't think anybody is using Swing willingly -- or enjoying it. Besides the "uncanny valley" effect to native widgets, it suffered from the start from the main negative of Java's culture: it was overengineered. On top, it underdelivers in many areas.
Just out of curiosity, what other gui tool kits have you used that you compare Swing too? I always wonder what gui toolkits those who decry Swing have experience with.
Myself, I've used Win 32 api, MFC, SWT, and gtk. Imo, Swing is by far the best of those; relatively consistent api, a wide variety of widgets, customizable, ... True it can be very complex (ie editor kits) and some things are/were missing for a long time (close buttons in tabbed panes). Also true that it doesn't look 'native' on all platform, but no gui tool kit can. I have not used Qt, but it seems to be equivalent to, or surpass Swing in all those areas.
>Just out of curiosity, what other gui tool kits have you used that you compare Swing too? I always wonder what gui toolkits those who decry Swing have experience with.
I've used Cocoa, GTK on Linux, and Windows Forms (or whatever .NET v1 and v2 had called) in Windows. Have also used Swing.
Quality of results wise, Cocoa beats them all down, but single platform unfortunately. The .NET solution was also nice, but limited to a single platform too. (I know of, but don't care for small-time hacks to make Cocoa/.NET play on other platforms, only for officially supported projects).
Swing had been a pain in the ass to create UIs with, overengineered, with missing functionality (how long did we have to wait for a HTML control?) and ugly too boot.
Swing has one thing going for it: it does work on all platforms. I just wish it was better designed (API wise), more complete, and less uncanny valey-ish.
Just out of curiosity, what other gui tool kits have you used that you compare Swing too? I always wonder what gui toolkits those who decry Swing have experience with.
Myself, I've used Win 32 api, MFC, SWT, and gtk. Imo, Swing is by far the best of those; relatively consistent api, a wide variety of widgets, customizable, ... True it can be very complex (ie editor kits) and some things are/were missing for a long time (close buttons in tabbed panes). Also true that it doesn't look 'native' on all platform, but no gui tool kit can. I have not used Qt, but it seems to be equivalent to, or surpass Swing in all those areas.