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Comment by bootman | Hacker News Reader

Java has been such an amazingly solid technological foundation... and for a long, long time! It may not be the most sexy language but it's been a stable one. We have applications created with Java 1.4 running happily on Java 21 LTS and expect to upgrade to this latest LTS (Java 25) soon. Java for the win!

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I wonder where Java would be today without superb tooling and smart student programs from JetBrains.

Java has enjoyed powerful IDEs since late 1990's, some of them are even free beer!

Java was thriving during the golden age of Eclipse Foundation and IDE. JetBrains is very much recent.

> JetBrains is very much recent.

JetBrains is 25 years old, almost as old as Java.

IntelliJ use wasn't that widespread until about 10-15 years ago. Java was thriving before that.

It was in heavy use in London investment banks in 2005. Even resharper was commonplace by the following year.

Around 10 years ago Eclipse was still the primary editor in the circles I was in.

Still is on my circles, and at home I have been always a Netbeans fan.

I am an IDE guy since Borland products for MS-DOS, yet I was never sold on InteliJ anyway, and Android Studio made me dislike it even further.

I was using Eclipse back then, but indeed Wikipedia says IDEA 1.0 (Jan 2001) predates Eclipse IDE (Nov 2001).

NetBeans was bought by Sun in 1999 and opensourced on Jun 2000.

The Java world had plenty of student programs without Jet Brains. There is even a student-focused IDE, BlueJ, with plenty of visual representations to help people new to programming get their bearings - and this existed since 1999.

Sadly BlueJ teaches people almost exactly the wrong things about object-oriented programming.

Kind of tangential, I still remember Gmail app created in Java which used to run on my touch Symbian phone in 2009. It was cute as hell and got the work done.

The JVM and its ecosystem can be used from other languages too like Scala which has all the sexy stuff, also clojure et al

And Kotlin!

Neat, I wrote some swing apps back in the day that I've thought about resurrecting, but didn't want to have to do much modifying since they are mostly toys, though useful to me. I'm gonna give it a try!

Is Swing good now? Usually when people say Java is good now I assume they're not talking about Swing.

No, swing is pretty out of fashion if not deprecated. I know it pretty well, but still wouldn't choose it if starting a new project today.

I'd use Qt, though if you're not comfortable with C++ I've been told JavaFX is pretty good

ive tried javafx but its always easier to me to go back to swing, if it aint broke dont fix it.

Swing is standard part of JDK, there is nothing deprecated, it even got a Metal backend.

Awesome, thank you, that is great to hear

Swing is swing, it's as good as it's always been (eye of the beholder). As I understand it, it hasn't completely rotted on the shelf, they've made updates to the rendering to better leverage modern hardware, but it's not a modern toolkit by any means. But it is maintained, it still works.

JavaFX is good (I really like FX), and maintained, and portable. They just came out with 25 I think. But it's a completely different model than Swing.

Sure, but the same might be said of the subset of Java that existed twenty years ago; this is different from what people mean when they say "Java's good now".

JavaFX is better than swing, having done both (swing in a past life). CSS support is the big deal, plus modern rendering pipelines. Add that to the nice FP goodies and for-real cross-plaf packaging, (plus LLMs to get you through the crufty bits), it's IMO a serious contender for desktop UI.

It's as great as it ever was. I like it as its very stable and has a good model of interaction but if you want a modern embeddable map or embeddable chart stick with web interfaces. If you do go with swing definitely check out flatlaf to make it look modern.

Your neighbor's dog barks at Swing.

I wrote a swing app a long time ago (20+ years ago) that was used in operating theaters to register organs for transplantation. Swing has saved many lives since. Swing has been good enough for a long time.

As a point of reference, JetBrains platform is on top of swing, and I'd guess that's a significant contributor to why they're able to deliver consistently across Linux, macOS, and Windows. Unlike Eclipse SWT which ships native code for all the platforms it targets

My understanding is that JetBrains puts a heroic amount of effort into making their Swing components not look terrible, and that they can do this because they're a well-resourced engineering-centric company whose main product is a GUI app whose users spend all day in it and often pay for it out of pocket. That Swing might be underrated for this use case (if you also need to ship cross-platform) is an intriguing possibility, but different from whether it's a good choice for the marginal GUI app.

I disagree. That has not been my experience whatsoever. Every company I helped, and it's been dozens, had struggles moving to a new versions of the JVM. Every single time there were major issues that required a lot of re-work and re-testing. I bailed around Java 17 or 18, but it didn't matter because NOBODY I was working with was actually even using that version! On one particularly bad project in 2022, a client had a security imperative to update the JVM from 1.5 on a major internal system and my role was to determine efficacy. I quickly found out that several key libraries had ceased support long ago around Java 1.7 and there was no path forward for those. They were simply deprecated products. My team tried getting the source code and re-compiling those 3rd party jars, with the idea of taking ownership of that code, but it was spiraling in terms of scope. They would not listen to me that even getting them to 1.7 was going to be problematic. Worse, some drive-by manager would not believe my appraisal and brought another guy to prove me wrong. It turned into this big pissing contest, which I resented. The other resource wasn't anywhere near as experienced as me, just kind of arrogant and overly confident. I decided to fire that client, which sucked because they were the tippy top of the Fortune 10. Last I heard, they had not made any progress with that upgrade and were still using it on 1.5.

This must be satire

Yes been there but technically this has nothing to do with Java but mis-management. The same issue could have occured in a company with Typescript or C++ for that matter. Keeping your software secure requires maintanance and requires active monitoring of 3rd party libraries and occational switching of libraries and partial rewrites. Sticking you head in the sand and hoping to keep everything running without maintenance will at some point require a full rewrite or extreme high costs to get to a product without CVE's.

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