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| This is a personal blog of Yakov Fain My son's animations and music No BS IT podcast Америчка |
for GUI, I don't mind doing it manually, I've gotten used to it. One
problem that always haunt me down is J2EE. I do not know yet why my servlet
needs to be reloaded frequently (i use Tomcat, have not afforded to use
commercial J2EE server) and this happened at the previous company that I
worked at. I suspect the database but still wondering wether any other
cause.
GUI development is getting better all the time but, Java's multimedia
handling is a joke. 100% Java multimedia codecs, tools and libraries are
needed. Linux distributions have a variety of codecs and libraries
available. Sun should be able to do better.
As I have often seen in my 28 years in software development, the "next big
thing" may be an old thing - fat(better term: "pumped up") clients and/or
applets. All the GUI sex and violence you'd ever want is available once you
step away from HTML and Javascript. The bandwidth concerns for applets is
generally a thing of the past. The ubiquitous browser can still be the
starting point to launch these (our company does this all the time, as do
others I'm sure) and a separate window is likely more good than bad. All in
all, a big ripe fruit hanging right at eye-level - but it's been hanging
there so long that many don't notice it anymore.
Maybe the next big thing for Java is compilers that enable applications
written in other languages to run on the Java VM. Check out
http://www.missionsoft.com/ for an example of a compiler that translates
Smalltalk to Java bytecodes.
My $.02 is that Java on the desktop will be recorded in history as a
research project that ended in futility unless Sun makes it opensource. The
Eclipse RCP (uses SWT) has enabled our GUI developers to build the sexiest
UI's I've seen with Java and in less time than Swing. I agree with Chuck
that java's multi-media handling also seems to lag behind what other
frameworks/libraries can do. Lately, there's lots of focus on GUI's being
designed declaratively with XML to ease web-based deployment. Look at XUL
from Mozilla and OpenLaszlo. Sun is still futzing with JavaWebStart as
their deployment model. At least with OpenLaszlo, Java is being used on the
back end where Sun has largely focused its energy ever since the first EJB
concept was put down in a draft specification. This is why I think the GUI
aspects of swing should be open sourced. If sun wants to focus on Java as
THE language for backend systems, that's great news! It means the language
will have a niche or stronghold to defend and Sun can FOCUS. Sun should
allow enterprising and creative developers then to extend Java to other
uses (like GUI's) and web-deployment. Sun sells hardware and that's where
their focus on Java remains..to sell workstations, servers and storage, not
to build consumer-friendly internet applications.
The next big thing in Java? Try Guise, the agile GUI framework to
complement Hibernate and Spring. No JavaScript coding is needed.
To solve the problem for a new approach to Java gui I'm thinking of
converting HTML pages produced in DreamWeaver into Java Swing code. Here's
more elaboration of the idea:
AJAX? Forget it! For building RIAs, the best choice for me is the
combination of Flash (frontend) Java (backend).
