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After downloading Jambi, having a look at the examples and their accompanying source code, I am unconvinced that it will go far.

1) The code looks similar to Swing. By that, I mean that it is almost as verbose. For example, something that takes 10 lines to accomplish in Swing is going to take you roughly the same to accomplish in Jambi. Perhaps my opinion will change if I coded in Jambi professionally, but the examples I've seen do not convince me of any worthwhile productivity gain over Swing.

2) GUI Fidelity. I know that many Java developers are whining at Apple right now for not releasing Java 6. But ... one thing they have done right with Java as far as I'm concerned is Swing. Swing looks and feels native on OS X. The only giveaway is how components are spaced (i.e. they do not respect the Apple HIG). Jambi and Swing look pretty similar on OS X. They are so similar that they even have the same spacing problem. I don't know the situation on other operating systems like Windows and Linux, but as far as OS X is concerned there is no reason to dump Swing because Jambi looks similar.

3) Custom components. A common criticism of Swing is how it lacks a wide variety of components. The most cited example, is the date picker. Ok, Jambi comes with a date picker (QCalenderWidget) and an analog dial (QDial). It provides some handy input widgets that take care of formatting of dates, but it's not like you can't do that with a few lines of code in a changeListener of a JTextEdit.
A visual guide to Swing Components: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/ui/features/components.html
A visual guide to Jambi Widgets: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/gallery-macintosh.html

4) Price. Jambi costs a lot of money. From the pricing site:
License Pricing (per developer)
One Platform € 1420
Two Platforms € 2130
Three Platforms € 2840

You're paying close €2840 for some custom components that Swing doesn't have, similar visuals on OS X, perhaps slightly better visuals on Linux, can't comment about the look on Windows. In comparison, Swing is free and if the looks aren't that hot on Linux/Windows, you can always code in SWT which is free too. I need to point out too that the listed price is per developer. So if you have a team of developers the cost of licenses is going to sky rocket. Sorry for the use of hyperbole, maybe it doesn't sky rocket since that implies exponential growth, but the cost is still going to grow linearly unless Trolltech implements some unpublished volume license scheme.


There are other miscellaneous things that I shall briefly mention. Qt-Designer is pretty cool, but the Java alternatives are getting there. Matisse is shaping up to be a very good GUI designer. Jambi could perform better since Qt is renown for its speed. But then this has yet to be demonstrated for Jambi.

In conclusion, the price tag coupled with the lack of any large improvement over the existing free Java GUI toolkits will make Jambi a hard sell to existing Java developers. They can get away with such pricing in the C++ world because C++ lacks a viable cross platform GUI development library. It remains to be seen whether the same holds true in Java land.

Of course, someone could point out some super-major-killer-feature of Jambi that I've left out that makes it all worthwhile in the end ...

Edited 2007-12-07 08:39