
Why should JS coders have all the fun? - shahriarhaque
http://squery.posterous.com/why-should-js-coders-have-all-the-fun-0
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tomjen3
I haven't seen anybody write new Swing GUIs like he did in quite some time.
First of all, you don't have to declare the listeners on the form class, and
you typically would create an anonymous that listens to each component.

Second, there is a library called swixml (<http://www.swixml.org/>) which
allows you to write the GUI part of the code in a declarative manner and have
the library wire the two things together.

Both makes it much less of a pita to write GUIs in Java.

~~~
raju
Agreed. I did quite a bit of Swing development a few years ago.

There is also Griffon (<http://griffon.codehaus.org/>) that is a MVC (Rails
like) framework for Swing apps that uses Groovy. I haven't used it, but from
what I have seen, it does make it easier to work with Swing.

I had not heard of swixml. Thanks for the pointer.

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DanielRibeiro
Even in java ecosystem, there are several tools that make gui desing easier:
Swing builder in groovy (<http://groovy.codehaus.org/Swing+Builder>), Scala
Swing Dsl ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1570175/scala-and-
swing-g...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1570175/scala-and-swing-gui-
applications)), Cheri for jruby ([http://objectmix.com/ruby/251973-cheri-
builder-style-jruby-s...](http://objectmix.com/ruby/251973-cheri-builder-
style-jruby-swing-gui-development.html)), and the list goes on.

But it's good to see the effort on Java as well, which can do DSLs as well,
even those these are easier on languages that actively support them, such as
scala, groovy, ruby, clojure, ...

~~~
jamesbritt
I seriously do not understand why people don't just use the free GUI builder
that comes with Netbeans, then wire up the resulting classes.

And wiring them up doesn't get any easier than using JRuby with Monkeybars
(<http://monkeybars.org>). Yes, I'm biased, I'm the project leader. But still.
:)

DSLs and such are nice for smallish UIs, but once you get to anything remotely
sophisticated tweaking text files to sort out alignment, flow, balance, etc.
is crazy. (And double crazy if those text files are XML.)

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Great link. I knew monkeybars once, but totally forgo about it. It seems
complement swing with what glade does to gtk (and its code generators do, from
taking xml and turning into python/ruby/perl,etc files).

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lsb
As a Java-for-pay programmer, I'm not extremely experienced in the Java
ecosystem; why use Swing to make a GUI instead of using HTML?

~~~
wlievens
Swing for desktop apps, HTML for webapps, I guess.

~~~
calcnerd256
I yearn for the day when we laugh at that mindset.

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heresy
Ugh, casting.

Is the use of generics in Java still not common?

