Not to be mean, but I worked with Swing for ten years and it was absolute crap. Constantly dealing with resizing “collapsars”, GBLs, poor visual compatibility with the host OS, a fragile threading model and piles and piles of unfixed bugs and glitches was a nightmare. It might have worked if you had a specific end user environment but it was a PITA for anything else, and deployment was even harder.
There are a few things I definitely miss from my 20 years as a Java dev, but the half assed and under funded Swing UI is not among them.
but it's not like it was that worse than flex bugs ( https://codepen.io/sandrosc/pen/YWQAQO still does render differently in chrome than firefox - which one is wrong is immaterial)
But HTML/CSS/JS aren't anywhere near good enough to build GUIs of any complexity by themselves, so everyone layers tons of stuff on top. And then those ... those, people have plenty of complaints about too. But if they didn't use them those complaints would migrate to the underlying framework.
I mean, Swing may have had a fragile threading model (not sure what you mean by that really), but HTML doesn't have one at all. Not great!
I agree with you 100%, and was really just addressing the “swing is awesome” statement in the GP. I’ll take HTML etc over Swing any day, but I’m sure there are nicer alternatives if your deployment environment is native, e.g. SwiftUI (which I have no experience with)
There are plenty of things wrong with HTML & friends, await/async and webpack being my personal hair removers, but if we set that aside and just talk about the DOM as the API for the UI, it’s very robust, well documented and widely available. I don’t love it, but it works.
HTML was never meant for building apps. We took a square peg (document markup language) and jammed it into a round hole (app development.) Most of the problems and frustrations with web development go back to this.
We've been using the wrong tool for the job for over 2 decades. Now it's everywhere and nobody knows any better. It's probably too late now.
There are a few things I definitely miss from my 20 years as a Java dev, but the half assed and under funded Swing UI is not among them.
Give me HTML+CSS+JS any time.