Is Java good for writing simple, yet sleek GUI apps?

[Chris Smith]

how about an HTML GUI interface ? its fast , easy and reliable.

Depends on what you want to do. There are very serious limitations to
what can be done without JavaScript; along with somewhat serious
limitations to what can be done with JavaScript. Once JavaScript is
added, the "reliable" part goes out the window; there are all sorts of
platform-specific, browser-specific, and version-specific behaviors of
JavaScript, which are frequently encountered and difficult to avoid.

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way to Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation

 

[steve]

steve coughed up:

.....While being exceedingly careful to remain thread-safe. Swing is not
thread safe. Nor are the collection classes (by default). And even with
totally thread safe classes, you can /still/ get yourself into hot water if
you don't synchronize properly.

Java is mighty powerful. But don't go thinking that you can just launch
multiple threads without worry.

That was not the issue under discussion.
A global statement was made that java is a crap language , because it is
slow.

Thread safety and synchronization are a separate but important issue.

the main point i like , is that i can sit my directors/staff down at a screen
, drag some buttons about , and prototype very fast.

nothing works, but you can still navigate thru tabs & menus.

prototyping this guys requirements would take perhaps a morning, and an
afternoon to debug/ clean up.

 

[steve]

Mark Wright coughed up:

One joyful day (Wed, 08 Sep 2004 06:08:12 GMT to be precise), "Thomas
G. Marshall" <[email protected]>
decided that the Usenet community would benefit from this remarkable
comment:


True, but provided all threaded Swing access is done via
EventQueue.invokeLater() you shouldn't have any problems updating a
GUI from threads.

Ah, sure, and very good point for the OP. But that's not what I was
responding do. Steve's post:

Steve:
the trick with java is all in the threads, most bad
developers try to do everything in 1 thread, ( usually
the graphics thread), so they end up with shitty ,slow
programs. which they then blame on the java. The
idea is to launch multiple threads , so that operations
do not block each other & bog your application down.

You, he, and I are correct. But his statement of (Para-Ph) "not doing
everything in the graphics thread" and "launch[ing] multiple threads" needs
a strong thread safety caveat, particularly for the OP who claims to have no
GUI experience.

...[snip]...

I have seen programmers, stick calls to load files & 2,000 rows of database ,
actually in a button listener.
then wonder why the button stays "selected", until the calls return.
and we will not even discuss , status bars, and how a java app can "exit" but
still be running.

 

[Alex Molochnikov]

You might be interested in Scribe:

www.gestalt.com/Scribe

Login: guest
Password: star

It will let you query the databases graphically, drill down the hierarchy of
data, and many other things, as well as do your own coding in Java.

Alex Molochnikov
Gestalt Corporation

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

steve coughed up:

Mark Wright coughed up:

One joyful day (Wed, 08 Sep 2004 06:08:12 GMT to be precise),
"Thomas G. Marshall"
<[email protected]> decided that
the Usenet community would benefit from this remarkable comment:

.....While being exceedingly careful to remain thread-safe. Swing
is not thread safe.

True, but provided all threaded Swing access is done via
EventQueue.invokeLater() you shouldn't have any problems updating a
GUI from threads.

Ah, sure, and very good point for the OP. But that's not what I was
responding do. Steve's post:

Steve:
the trick with java is all in the threads, most bad
developers try to do everything in 1 thread, ( usually
the graphics thread), so they end up with shitty ,slow
programs. which they then blame on the java. The
idea is to launch multiple threads , so that operations
do not block each other & bog your application down.

You, he, and I are correct. But his statement of (Para-Ph) "not
doing everything in the graphics thread" and "launch[ing] multiple
threads" needs a strong thread safety caveat, particularly for the
OP who claims to have no GUI experience.

...[snip]...

I have seen programmers, stick calls to load files & 2,000 rows of
database ,

LOL. Scary, isn't it?

actually in a button listener.
then wonder why the button stays "selected", until the calls return.
and we will not even discuss , status bars, and how a java app can
"exit" but still be running.

Oh criminey yes, I've seen that as well. But I've also seen the following
ad-infinitum:

guiThingy.mutate();

from multiple threads. Or as I brought up in another thread, the even less
obvious, far more insidious:

guiThreadSafeThingy.set(guiThreadSafeThingy.get() + 1);

which even though the methods are thread safe, the increment between calls
is not.

 

[Joona I Palaste]

;-) I was almost going to mention earlier,
that I get help from a lot of people with
'foreign sounding' names, and assume they
grew up in America or Britain because
they can correct my grammar, ..only to
discover later that they had never as
much as visited either country.

Because of my good knowledge of written English, I've been thought as a
British woman living in Finland. I've responded by telling that I'm
neither British nor a woman.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Because of my good knowledge of written English, I've been thought as a
British woman living in Finland.

I get mistaken for British by most other Aussies!

I've responded by telling that I'm
neither British nor a woman.

What do you mean by, '..nor a woman'?


;-)

--
Ms. Andrew Thompson
http://www.PhySci.org/codes/ Web & IT Help
http://www.PhySci.org/ Open-source software suite
http://www.1point1C.org/ Science & Technology
http://www.lensescapes.com/ Images that escape the mundane

 

[Michael Saunby]

Because of my good knowledge of written English, I've been thought as a
British woman living in Finland. I've responded by telling that I'm
neither British nor a woman.

Ah but coding's different, it's more like poetry than prose and modern
English (language) poetry comes from all corners of the globe. Some can be
rather hard to understand, but the better stuff (both code and poetry) has
patterns to it that tend to make me smile.

e.g.
http://notjustbeerandpubs.com/tomleonard/access_to_the_silence/100_differences.shtml

or even, http://www.yclusa.org/article/articleview/1570/1/294

Michael Saunby

 

[Mike Schilling]

Because of my good knowledge of written English, I've been thought as a
British woman living in Finland. I've responded by telling that I'm
neither British nor a woman.

Nor an empire.

(If that's too obscure, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire)