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Comment by zombie2 | Hacker News Reader

thats cold man

Harsh but fair. I've been doing java for about 25 years and consider myself an expert in that language. I know absolutely nobody that does desktop applications in Java these days (swing or javafx) at this point and that has been true for well over a decade. I get approached by recruiters for lots of shit I would never do but Java desktop aint one of those things. The last time I did anything swing related must have been 15 years ago and it was a questionable choice then already. The only popular swing applications I know of are developer tools like intellij. I've never encountered anything javafx in the wild.

Hi, there are a few things I have wanted to ask from someone who is working with Java professionally as it is the programming language I know best (for context: I am a student who will be graduating in a year).

What is Java still being used for? is it mostly Spring work and Android apps or are there still other use cases?

What do you use Java for? or What is the nature of work that you do which makes use of Java?

It would be very helpful if you could answer these.

As someone else who uses java professionally a lot, let me weigh in.

Most large services are backed by web servers in the backend. What do you imagine most people use for web/http servers? Java. What other language can you use? C++? Large scale services are too error prone, especially if not maintained by experienced devs and besides, no one codes restful services in C++. NodeJS? It's weakly typed and is javascript. I know it's really popular but rarely used in large backends not fronting a UI.

Java is still king almost everywhere.

> What other language can you use?

On my line of work, .NET is the only alternative, when customer is not up to using Java for whatever reasons.

On both cases, C++ just has a tiny integration role to some libraries or OS APIs than we might eventually need to access to.

>>What do you imagine most people use for web/http servers? Java.

You are trolling, right? Lol ... PHP, Go, Javascript, Python, C#, Ruby are pretty popular.

Thank you so much for your answer, it has been really helpful.

"still"? You say that like it was a legacy language!

Not a legacy language it is just that the trend has been to use electron for x-platform desktop apps instead of something a bit more reasonable like Java.

I am trying to build a desktop app with lots of custom GUI components, involves custom GUI component/event + drag and drop. I am fairly proficient in Java and I think Swing would good option for me to start building the app. Currently I am reading "Filthy Rich Client". I have not investigated into JavaFX yet. I know for desktop C++/Qt is a better solution, but I don't want to go back to C++ and because i don't feel comfortable the language features and it's tool chain. I like the Java ecosystem, and I think I will be more productive in Java/Swing.

Do you have any suggestion for building desktop app with custom GUI? Should I avoid working with Swing? What other language/framework combination do you think a better fit for the project?

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