Swing provides a complete set of standard GUI components, ranging from simple buttons and text fields to feature-rich tables, trees, and text editors. This article presents a drawing component used by an image-annotation application named JImaging.
Creating Custom Desktop Components
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Ok, but can someone explain why we dont see so many swing ui applications , i know a few , but most of them are development tools and they really suck in speed (maybe the drawing speed is so terrible) and i also know that SWT is tring to change this.
If you put me choose between Swing,AWT,SWT and .NET , of course i will choose .NET , it is trully faster then any java based solution and provides verry good quallity components (where are the swing components , the ui beans , where are they , a simple search on google will give you just a few , if you compare it with .NET , then again , .NET is on top).
But all this adavantages of .NET fall when it comes to cross-platform applications.
IMHO Swing would need an entire new philosophy, i want to see charting components , advanaced input components and more advanced ui components.
Usually i dont have time to implement an animated chart for a project or a browser component , what if my project needs some flash embending( cross platform also , not a screwed activex trick for java).
And there are more to say regarding time of development.
SO I REALLY SAY , Swing need to be Restructured , so SUN , do something guys, it seems that you have forgot from where you started , i say java is not only for server&mobile dev …
Swing, AWT and SWT are GUI class libraries for the Java platform. .NET like Java is a platform. So, comparing e.g. Swing with .NET is IMHO like comparing a wheel set with a car.
There are various third party libs which provide Swing based charting components.
Carsten
Java is dead, Sun just doesn’t realize it yet. Overall Swing, and Java both are incredibly slow, and useless.
Java is Dead
Really. Well I just started using it!
Do any of you guys actually develop Swing AND WinForms applications?
There are many cases of WinForms performing *very* badly – particularly DataGrid (it has some awesome features though!)
And in many cases .NET applications still takes a long time to start…
Java is as dead as .NET – and neither is dying!
Anyway – stop comparing Swing (multi platform) with WinForms (Windows only) – last time I checked WinForms didn’t work on non Windows platforms (say the Rotor distribution). Might be some interresting things in mono, but it probably performs crappy compared to the Windows implementation.
Every article here seems to be responded to with some kind of flamewar, A vs. B. The first poster of this thread only takes one paragraph and then we have it already.
And the responses seem always the same. Even though it had been said in threads on OSNews before, people still argue that Java == slow. Probably because they have used a few Java apps that were slow to start, or because they have encountered some ‘spinning logo’-Applets. Were these people not paying attention before, or are they new posters?
Let’s say it again: Java by itself is not slow. Both MS and Sun claim to be the fastest, but it depends on the kind of task you’re trying to accomplish.
SWING though, can be pretty slow! I read that the latest release of Java improved on the performance of SWING, but haven’t tried it yet. Has it gotten better?
I have used both. Swing applications do feel slower when in use, but Windows Forms based applications take forever to start (once they have started I have had no major problems with speed).
With Longhorn it seems likely that most of the .NET GUI components will be loaded with the OS (at all times), so startup times should be considerably faster.
SwingWT with SWT is way cool and virtually eliminates the need for Sun’s Swing library entirely. With GCJ its even better. Not perfect yet. But any problems I’ve run into at least I can work around. Rare that I can’t design a GUI with a Swing GUI builder and SwingWT not handle it with the speed of native SWT. I think times are good for Java.
Java is not dead. And will not die for a long time. Java is no way the perfect language but that isn’t .NET either. All languages comes with some good things and some bad things.
By dead, do you mean, used by millions (and growing) developers around the world? Hm, looks like Windows is dead too. Oh, and C++, that’s REALLY dead. Linux is dying then, and will be totally dead soon, oh no!
Uh, you get the message.
About Swing, it is not lightning fast, but IT IS fast enough to develop desktop applications in. The problem with Swing is that is was very slow in older JVMs and it has taken (and will still take) some time to get rid of that stygma. Also, fancy look and feels really kill Swing performance so sticking to a standard L&F is the first step in having a snappy Swing GUI.
About Longhorn, when it is finally out, the world’s computers will not have it teleported into their harddrives. All of Longhorn’s candy coating of the internet will be unused for many years to come except by a few eager MS groupies until enough computers have been sold with Longhorn preinstalled to build a critical mass. This will take a long time. .NET was a mistake. Microsoft should have competed whithin the Java world. For all their talk, they really ARE NOT INTERESTED in competing. Cheers,
SteveQ.
Your momma is dead.
Try that on for size, you freaking barmies. Java is not dead. Java was not a mistake. .NET is not dead. .NET is not a mistake. They are both going to be highly competitive platforms of the future. That’s “futar” for you people who think its clever to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign and those who think virtual machine sharing is a thing of the past.
I mean, be serious. Java and .NET are even being picked up as the programming language series for computer science courses as academia catches up with the real world. That’s pretty high praise for a dead language, although you obviously can’t discount the fact that they may have used necromancy to raise them from the dead – you can never tell.
What, do you think you’re smarter than the University educational system as a whole? Really, do you, punk?!
For all people saying that Java is dead/java is slow:
If you have never seen a Java/Swing application:
– you probably have never worked on multinational companies. Java has a large, very large market with big companies.
– you probably never used Oracle (the most used database on fortune 500 enterprises) tools for development.
– you have never worked with SAP, Peoplesoft and others…
– the only web development that you do is probably small web stores with a few hundred clients a day.
and don’t try to say that .NET is used on these markets too.. It would be a lie.
Uh oh! guess you better tell all those fortune 500 companies who have invested billions in java business logic applications to pack up, and leave!
get real. java’s here to stay for a long long time. it’s the cobol of the 70s, and as such, it will be part of business server and client systems for decades to come. quite frankly, it’s much better with stability, maintainability, and cross-platform support than anything else on the market. speed is not important when hardware is so cheap, that you can throw an extra 128mb of ram and +500mhz at a problem to just use java and reduce the massive development costs with C++/.NET (of which neither have a seamless cross platform UI and business logic solution). J2EE and swing are very powerful. I don’t see the .NET equivalent to either.
When Java first started it was slow due to the fact that it is actually interpreted instead of compiled. Modern CPU speeds have eliminated much of this and Java has gotten much faster as well. I recently played Quake 2 rewritten in Java ( http://www.bytonic.de/html/jake2.html ) and got about 230 fps in speed on an Athlon 2500 with Ti4200. A replay on a 500 Mhz GF2 system netted 68 fps. Java is just now coming into it’s own and due to it’s multiplatform abilities it will continue to grow.
“Ok, but can someone explain why we dont see so many swing ui applications , i know a few , but most of them are development tools and they really suck in speed (maybe the drawing speed is so terrible) and i also know that SWT is tring to change this.”
because the majority of java application are in enterprise
Can you explain why we see only c++, c gui application?
Why we don’t see .net gui application?
“If you put me choose between Swing,AWT,SWT and .NET , of course i will choose .NET , it is trully faster then any java based solution and provides verry good quallity components (where are the swing components , the ui beans , where are they , a simple search on google will give you just a few , if you compare it with .NET , then again , .NET is on top).”
you have just shown that you were ignorant
you have never used a java application to said that…
check any benchmark, java is often ahead of c, c++
do you know that java code is compiled when it run?
java the majority of the time ahean .net
ya .net is slow
“But all this adavantages of .NET fall when it comes to cross-platform applications.
IMHO Swing would need an entire new philosophy, i want to see charting components , advanaced input components and more advanced ui components.
Usually i dont have time to implement an animated chart for a project or a browser component , what if my project needs some flash embending( cross platform also , not a screwed activex trick for java).”
they are a lot of component to do that, if you are a wannabe, we can’t doing nothing for you
“And there are more to say regarding time of development.
SO I REALLY SAY , Swing need to be Restructured , so SUN , do something guys, it seems that you have forgot from where you started , i say java is not only for server&mobile dev …
”
YOU need to be Restructured, goes to school for more passed for morons
Before you call other people ignorant learn how to write and quit showing your ignorance.
“you have never used a java application to said that… ”
“”And there are more to say regarding time of development.”
“YOU need to be Restructured, goes to school for more passed for morons”
These statements and many others show were the moron is. You are the one that needs to “goes to school for more passed” in your own words of course.
“Before you call other people ignorant learn how to write and quit showing your ignorance.
“you have never used a java application to said that… ”
“”And there are more to say regarding time of development.”
“YOU need to be Restructured, goes to school for more passed for morons”
These statements and many others show were the moron is. You are the one that needs to “goes to school for more passed” in your own words of course.”
continue morron, surely iongion is your brother
big family of champion
english is not my 1 langage, morron, loser like you talk only one langage
big winner
See: http://swingwt.sourceforge.net/
Its basically a Swing api compatibility layer that uses SWT underneath.
>>”These statements and many others show were the moron is”
Cmon.. Is english your first language? Try to learn the difference between “were” and “where” before complaining about others..
Mr. Marc Collin, you have really missed the point here, and from what i read in these posts most of ideeas come to something that i figured now : “most of the applications are bussiness applications”, and the guy who said this is really a knower , not because he said it, but because he expressed it in this context.
You really lost the main issue because SUN was in the center of this , they usually complain that java is not penetrating the desktop area, where dozens of small applications do the job quite well.
In these days you see that development takes developer to fast exploitation of his tools , and as you know java is verry good at abstraction ( beans technology ), i just raised some issues regarding this easyness in development that SUN doesnt see or at least they dont want it to be seen.
Got it ?
So stop beeing a sick men!
And read a post as many times as it needs to get into your neural system.
Java is an interpreted lang. and .Net is complied lang. Surely .Net will be much faster then Java. Java interprets and the code line by line while .net compiles the program converts in an executable and then the application is ready to run. Advantage of .net-> fast execution. Advantage of java -> Architecturaly Neutral -> mostly preferred for wifi devices. Every lang as their pros and cons. AND YOU BETTER REMEMBER THAT!!!!!!!!!
>”But all this adavantages of .NET fall when it comes to cross-platform applications.”
To quote Bash.org:
“Saying Java is great because it works on all OS’es is like saying Anal sex is great because it works on all genders“.
I don’t care if you speak 100 languages, if you can’t speak this one right you cannot convey any ideas you may have efficiently. Your post was so poorly worded I couldn’t really tell what you wanted to say other than that everyone else here was stupid. I can’t respond to your post appropriatly because I can barely read it. I decided that in the light of this your insults concerning morons was somewhat hypocritical.
Hey, man, don’t hate on anal! Sometimes you run out of circles to ram your square peg into, and then what the hell are you supposed to do?!
“”Saying Java is great because it works on all OS’es is like saying Anal sex is great because it works on all genders”.”
The primary goal of the Java team was to create a cross platform language, and they succeeded admirably. .NET may be slightly faster, BUT it does not help me on my Linux box. Mono is a Linux .NET implementation, but Microsoft will wait until the appropriate time and kill it in order to squash all competition. So, comparing Java and .NET is comparing apples to oranges.
Mono is a Linux .NET implementation, but Microsoft will wait until the appropriate time and kill it in order to squash all competition.
Hehe, did you just wake up from some slashdweeb coma? Sorry, but the mono haters were using that line 2 years ago. Come up with something more original.
Java sucks pig nuts… You people need help
SwingWT cannot work. In Swing anything can be customized. In SWT nearly nothing can be. Take a look at the SWT news group on eclipse.org. Anything non standard is answered with “Not possible. Open a RFE and tell us a good reason why you need it”. Multiline Tablecells, Wysiwyg Text Editor, Antialiased drawing all this is not yet possible. I bet you can’t run SwingSet on SwingWT. Only the simple most Swing applications will be able to switch to SwingWT.
I do see a point in using SWT. It’s fast and looks nice and native, but it won’t be enough for fancy GUIs. And that’s what toolkits are about. Make the simple things easy and open a straight solution for complex problems. SWT fails on the latter.
Anyway I’m looking forward to KDE 3.3 😉
you are very, very wrong. both .net and java are compiled, or interpreted, depending on how you look at it. java and .net actually work in remarkably similar fashions (which is not suprising, cause microsoft is hardly known for innovating)
java and .net are comparible in many ways, the reason java is still the industry standard and .net growth is so slow is because java is a mature technology, while .net is not. and in the business sector, you dont use untried technology in a production environment, unless you feel like playing russian roulette with your business.
now last but not least, all the morons who are saying java is slow, i would really like to know your background/experience with java technology. do you by any chance have some benchmarks you would care to share with us?
every benchmark i have seen puts java at a comparible level to c++ (superior in some areas, inferior in others, but remarkably comparable) that is of course, assuming you people are I.T. professionals, or at the least hobbyests with some knowledge of what you are talking about. on the off chance that i am addressing fifteen year olds who found a three year old applet and judged it to be “slow”, and therefor “dead” , i will attempt to explain. your complaint is about the responsiveness of the JFC (commonly known as swing). the JFC is the part of java that gives us our pretty buttons and whatnot, our graphical user interface. there are parts of java where profoundly stupid descisions were made, this is one of them. the JVM draws everything in swing, it doesnt call up windows the “normal” way on an operating system. this results in greatly decreased responsivness. now please, try and understand this because im sick and tired of these flame wars by people who dont know what they are talking about. RESPONSIVNESS IS NOT EQUAL TO “SPEED”. just because an app appears sluggish via a graphical interface doesnt mean it is, and just because an app feels snappy, doesnt mean its not slow. visual basic is a prime example of this.
having a sluggish gui toolkit is probably what hindered java adoption as a viable gui language. however, that doesnt mean it failed, java is currently _the_ language for enterprise apps. so how exactly has this changed? the fact that so many people believe this total idiocy leaves me in awe of the microsoft marketing machine. anyone with even a small amount of knowledge about such things would dismiss it as tripe, but i have heard that “java is dead” from non-technical people in the industry (such as our vp of development, who knows some sql so he considers himself a coder) i am not trying to flame, im not trying to troll. im being completely serious, after this im pretty convinced microsoft could tell people the sky is green, and without missing a beat it managers and magazine publishers would start talking about the amazing discovery made at microsoft. i honestly really like .net, and it would be the one other platform i would consider working in if i stop java. who knows, maybe in five years it will be a different story. right now, java is still on top and we have yet to see if .net will make serious inroads into the market. if anyone tells you different, they are lieing or confused.
“Java is an interpreted lang. and .Net is complied lang. Surely .Net will be much faster then Java. Java interprets and the code line by line while .net compiles the program converts in an executable and then the application is ready to run. Advantage of .net-> fast execution. Advantage of java -> Architecturaly Neutral -> mostly preferred for wifi devices. Every lang as their pros and cons. AND YOU BETTER REMEMBER THAT!!!!!!!!!”
Are you sure you know java?
the jvm load only the code necessary to start the application, all the java code is compiled when executed
“re: Marc Collin
I don’t care if you speak 100 languages, if you can’t speak this one right you cannot convey any ideas you may have efficiently. Your post was so poorly worded I couldn’t really tell what you wanted to say other than that everyone else here was stupid. I can’t respond to your post appropriatly because I can barely read it. I decided that in the light of this your insults concerning morons was somewhat hypocritical.”
if you are not happy , don’t read my post morron
Mange de la marde
Fuck you
Du Arschloch
vaffunculo
vete a la mierda
I don’t see the advantage here, the reason why SWING apps are not widely deployed is simply…because not too many desktop applications in Java. LimeWire being the only exception, since I did use it.
I am very happy.
I don’t hate Mono. It seems to be a real sharp piece of work. I just don’t want to see Linux at the mercy of a ruthless company like Microsoft. Microsoft’s answer to the Mono question (will they kill it?) is always decidely uncommital. Maybe it means nothing, or maybe 5 years from now they will demand fees from the OSS community or just alter .Net enough to make Mono irrelevant.
“By z1xq (IP: 68.186.172.—) – Posted on 2004-08-17 23:04:24
I am very happy.”
tant mieux trou du cul
Java/J2EE is all we use in my group at work (in the IT department of a Fortune 100 company).
Try using NetBeans or Eclipse and see if you still think Java is too slow for GUI apps. Even better, try BEA’s WebLogic Workshop….you’d swear it was a native Windows app.