I came across an article on oreillynet.com discussing the lack of open source projects pertaining to Java Swing. I posted the following and hope that it can be of benefit:

I would like to note that I am making an effort to solve the problem discussed above with the JFCX project. There are really a couple of aspects with Swing that make it difficult to work with.

First, few take the time to understand how each widget uniquely implements the MVC framework and how flexible each component is as a result. Second, (and the down-side of the first point) the API is not “user friendly” to developers who simply don’t want to have to think too hard to create GUI’s.

In my opinion the Swing API covers about 80% of the everyday features that we all need. The rest usually needs to be developed. How the other 20% gets implemented can either open many doors or close them all.

I think a lot of the community (certainly not all) view desktop client development as a necessary evil to be offloaded to lesser skilled developers. I would argue that in a place where so much creativity and innovation need to thrive, the opposite would be ideal.

I invite you all to check out the jfcx project at jfcx.org. It’s open source (BSD license) and it’s a work in progress. I’d like your feedback and hope that it can help some of you.

Tags: java, swing, ui