Swing 2.0 is Coming

The biggest announcement - and the biggest surprise for many - of JavaOne 2010 was certainly Oracle's new plans for JavaFX 2.0... or, should we say, Swing 2.0? The history of JavaFX has been contentious since its beginning, when it was clear that FX was a new toolkit, even a new platform, while most people in the brave Swing community wanted a "Swing 2.0". Well, this is basically what Oracle is planning to deliver with JavaFX 2.0 - minus the ugly legacy of the AWT/Java2D/Swing APIs and architecture. JavaFX 1.x was an ideal replacement for Swing, but ideals don't always work; JavaFX 2.0 will be a more pragmatic attempt at "Swing 2.0". It's just not a drop-in update. Swing code won't be trivial to convert. The announced "plugin3", capable of running Prism, will be 100% free of AWT dependencies. Swing interop will keep requiring using the JavaFX Swing toolkit: the one that's bigger and slower. Non-evolutionary changes are sometimes necessary. The old UI APIs take my blame for Java's near-death on the desktop & web. Don't dream that the problem was just Sun's neglect, could be fixed by new VM optimizations, deployment improvements, JDK 7's Jigsaw... or the Tooth Fairy. As the partial success of the JDK 6uN project demonstrated once again, no amount of tuning or fixing can save Swing. Even in the Swing community, many wished for a compatibility-breaking Swing 2.0 that would just be simila...

Date: September, 23 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/opinali/archive/2010/09/23/swing-20-coming

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