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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Now combine it with JavaFX and we can have reasonably-sized cross-platform GUI apps again.

Yes, you can compile a QT or a GTK app for every platform, and use e.g. Python or Go to write the cross-platform part + package it into a single file. It's still as many files as you have platforms.

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It is interesting, but I wonder if it's not 10 years too late. Sometimes I feel Sun's dogmatism stopped them from taking over HTML5's role.

How easy is it to get a native look and feel with JavaFX on the various desktop OSes? That is, Windows, Mac, and Linux (GTK and Qt)?

Why do you think you need native look and feel?

I have worked on a Java desktop app with Swing UI for over a decade. Mid 2000s we would get asked to "modernise" our applications UI, which really meant: "make it look like Windows XP".

After Apple released iTunes, which totally ignored the native look and feel on Windows, people stopped caring so much as long as it looked ok and was intuitive. The boom in web apps with every SPA defining it own internal LAF through CSS and Javascript and the fad for flat UI components seems to have further watered down the arguments for conforming to a native LAF.

I haven't played much yet with JavaFX so can't answer your actual question but I believe it is more flexible than Swing and Swing is already very customisable (though you sometimes need to create your own widgets by extending/implmenting off the default widgets).

I don't need a native look a feel and most people probably don't even care about it, but I do care and I definitely prefer it. I loathe modern flat themes which completely lack affordance. However, I would like my applications to look like they belong on the host OS even if it has an unfortunate flat theme.

In order to practice what I preach, I'm looking for something that looks native for most cases that I can use for side projects and become proficient in. For my current project I chose SWT over Swing because SWT supports a native look on Linux (via GTK) while Swing doesn't (as far as I can tell). However, SWT is kind of clunky and I wonder if there are better options or if my previous research is out of date.

I recently tried to get a native look and feel with Swing, and this code worked on both linux and windows:

  try {
      UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());
  } catch( ClassNotFoundException | InstantiationException
           | IllegalAccessException | UnsupportedLookAndFeelException e ) {
  }

I originally found the UIManager line on StackOverflow, but I'm too lazy to go looking for the link.

Hmm, either what I read was wrong or I misunderstood what it was saying. Thank you for the correction.

In my limited experience, it's hard, but in most cases that isn't a problem. JavaFX is powerful, separating layout and styling from code via FXML and their CSS like language. If you want to style the application like a webapp it's a piece of cake, but if you want to style it to look native then you'll have to use stylesheets such as http://www.aerofx.org/

On the otherhand, with Swing all you need to do is add the following line:

  UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());

Okay, so for JavaFX you would need a specific style sheet for each OS version provided it doesn't support any theme customization. That's less than ideal, and a step backwards compared to Swing or SWT.

Do you really think size matters? Does JavaFX actually feel native on all the supported platforms? Qt and GTK usually don't.

There is a large niche for utility GUI programs that don't usually get a lot of UI polish or native feel. As long as they don't break general conventions and muscle memory, the users are OK with that. I suppose that JavaFX is comparable to Qt, and feels better than Tk or AWT, let alone a hastily-built web-based UI.

I see e.g. my wife, not an IT person, use a number of them. An eBay betting app, several utilities for bead art, etc, most written in Java years ago. Do they look polished and native? Hell no. Do they get the job done? They do. Could they look and feel better with a JavaFX UI? Quite likely. Would having a single binary to download, without installing a JRE first, improve their adoption rates? Quite likely again.

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