I have never been this confused. What the hell is wrong with Sun? Why build a house and when its time to furnish it, abandon it and build another because the one you built is not fine? Have you furnished it yet?

The funding of SwingX (swinglabs) have been stopped. Na this one even pain me pass. I for one has always looked forward to a day when the SwingX components would replace the current swing components. I thought they were the new direction the sun would set. But for where. there have not been much developments on the Core swing library for ages. Bug fixes abandoned. Performance and other pressing issues affecting java desktop were also abandoned. Most of the development coming into the java desktop have been from the developer community interms of component development, work arounds and all. Good components to enhance our applications are commercial. I rather switch language than purchase components for personal projects. The closest components to commercial components have been swingx components and now we would be attending its funeral soonest.

Well to all the developers of SwingX, thanks alot. Wish you good luck. I used SwingX for over 3 years and could still use it when i need to. I enjoyed using JXTable, JXList, JXErrorPane and so on,

After the disappointment of java3d being abandoned, beans binding left in a pre-alpha state in my opinion what will be next ?

Its no longer news that JavaFX is the next big thing in Java. Being a desktop person, I have tried out its desktop part and its lovely. The problems of SUN has never been creating powerful stuffs. Nah, its the marketing. Take a look at applets. Java Applet, IMHO, is the most powerful internet technology in RIA deployment. (I hate the term RIA, but let me just use it to carry everyone along), and lots of improvements have been made on it to improve its performance, but no one knows. The stigma of "Applets are slow","Applets would crash ur browser" and all that still exists. Same for the desktop.

Here are the words of a JavaFX tester

I have already tried to play with beta build JavaFX. I was one of the voluntary "tested subjects" at Sun's Usability test lab in Prague. As experienced Swing programmer I can say that I didn't like this technology at all. Very nifty demos (flying transparent shapes, moving pictures, ), but helpfulness for my download manager, text editor? Zero.

Here are the words of a Techy

Java applets can actually do most of these things if they are signed and the user agrees to allow the applet access to their filesystem. Unfortunately, Java applets don't actually work, and after 11 years of not working, I'm not expecting that to change. Facebook has a nice image uploader applet that lets you browse your photos locally and then scales them before uploading to make the whole thing go fast. The only problem, other than the annoying "do you want to trust this applet" prompt, is that it crashed my browser the second time I tried it.

While i disagee with him on the browser crashing stuff, the most annoying part of the whole thing is that he's right. 

So the next thing for SUN to do is to abandon what developers have trusted for years, the only truly cross platform application development tool. Well, you might want to argue that they didnt use the word abandon but tell me a noticeable improvement to Java since tiger. Asides TableSorter added to JTable, Nimbus LF and the Consumer JRE (1.6 update N). All the releases have been JavaFX this, JavaFX that.

Well, lets just hope the new technology survives the battle against Silverlight, Flash and AJAX. I pray it does because if it doesnt walahi, thunder should strike the CEO _{(word of mouth  )}. JavaFX is far more powerful than all the rest, but the Companies in question, Microsoft and Adobe have a berra marketing strategy to win the heart of developers.

Well if you good enough to write components, you cud get ur hands on the swingx codes https://swingx.dev.java.net/source/browse/swingx and do ur thing. For collaboratioonw with other java programmers visit www.naijadukes.net and lets see what we can do on our own. I love to develop components.

Bottom line, Technologies die, new technologies are born, people move to other companies, old prejudices refuse to die and some decisions are forced on technical people. The customers, of course, couldn’t care less about all this.

don't get me wrong oooo, its still Java all the way!!!

Correct me in areas i'm wrong please. Ur honest contributions are welcomed.

javalove believe me i love java in fact i am a FANATIC of java,however i believe sunmicrosystems has a good reason for doing what they did,changes or not well keep developing our needed softwares.peace ,keep lovin java

Why will anyone build desktop gui's with Java. Swing sucks big time. Using Java for desktop apps is just a share waste of time and effort when u can get it done in a fraction of the time using WinForms.

candylips:

Why will anyone build desktop gui's with Java. Swing sucks big time. Using Java for desktop apps is just a share waste of time and effort when u can get it done in a fraction of the time using WinForms.

@candylips, it is obvious you don't know the power of creating cross-platform applications! Java.Swing gives you dat!

you can have a c# front end with a java back end and still be platform neutral in a way since most users might be using Windows anyways.

@javalove
dont copy comments and rantings from foreign blogs here.There are actually a lot of silent but aware Java developers in Nigeria who view but might not post on this forum.That aside, like u rightly quoted the problem wth Sun is poor Marketing ,JavaFX has not come to replace Swing but to make developing visually rich java applications easy for pros and newbies.Part of the architecture is layered on Swing and the concept of the architecture is to enable developers right code once and deploy on multiple platforms(i.e. Mobile, Desktop ,blu-ray)to my knowledge that is revolutionary.Most of the JavaFX haters on these blogs if u know their history very well actually see JavaFX as a threat to their market cus they sell components and LaF which pimps Swing Apps easily.With JavaFX their market is dead u can easily create ur own sweet components.Any time u see people opposing innovation there is politics behind it.With JavaFX ur code can be an application,Applet,midlet whatever at the same time depending on the Hardware platform.Besides there r alot of new Java GUI Desktop frameworks( http://thinlet.com ) coming up, and they got nothin 2 do with Swing.Swing is not preferred by some folks cus it adds unecessary size to the JRE.December 2nd is the D-day.

When I posted this thread like 2 years ago, some heads called me names and accused me of copying posts from the net.

Now what has happened? JavaFX is a big big faliure!!!!!

Lots of developers still stuck with swing and other JVM languages

Corporations didn't think it wise to migrate to a technology whose roadmap was not clear. . .

What a child will see climbing a tree, an old man sees it sitting on a stool. . .


#Javalove. . .unless otherwise stated. . .!

And who tell you that JavaFx is yet another failure. Any that what I m using now cos I know that Netbeans IDE will soon develop a drag and drop conponet for it.