D "Swing"

[Chris]

On Monday, 24 December 2012 at 11:12:15 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-12-24 at 11:34 +0100, Chris wrote:
> […]
>> However, I also like HTML/JS solutions but am not sure whether 
>> they can replace a real GUI framework like Cocoa or Swing. JS 
>> is at times cumbersome to use for user interfaces.
> […]
>
> Possibly worth noting that the hope is that Swing goes away 
> very soon
> now. JavaFX is the current offering for graphics and GUI on the 
> JVM. Of
> course writing UIs in Java is a pain, hence GroovyFX
> (http://www.groovyfx.org). But, of course, writing UIs manually 
> is a
> pain so the generator to use is Griffon 
> (http://griffon.codehaus.org).

Yes, I agree Java is a pain when building GUI's. I only mentioned 
it as an example of an independent framework. Personally I'd 
prefer HTML(like) solutions for both desktop and mobile. There is 
simply no time for endless platform support, especially in small 
teams. But JS has its limitations as to UI development. So a 
solution that uses HTML for rendering and allows any language to 
implement the application logic would get my vote. I think the D 
community should look in that direction too. I am simply not 
convinced that DWT will take off (much as I appreciate the work 
that has been put into it), because I remember the huge effort it 
took SWT/JFace developers, although they were supported by a 
large community and a big company. Also, it seems a bit absurd 
that we have a good compilable cross-platform language like D and 
cannot fully use it as such due to GUI issues.