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Interesting point. What widgets may I ask? I dont have any experience with GTK and QT and what not since they are mostly just Linux only and I have played around a bit with Swing...since I am a JEE developer full time. I thought Java 6 was released to address the shortcomings of the Swing framework.

And also I do agree that Java is too rigid at the moment but the good thing about it is that backward compatibility is there. I mean its not like .NET where if one piece of software runs on .NET 2.0 for example, chances are it wont run on 3.0 at least that is what my understanding is. With the Java ideology you can still technically run 1.4 or even 1.3 code with 1.6 and that is a huge boon for a lot of large web apps. That is a big reason why it is "closed, will not be fixed".

I am just curious about what widgets you want that are not present in Swing. Last I looked it looked like it had all that standard widgets in it.

First and foremost: A statusbar. Sure you can use a label, but it looks like crap, and includes a lot of manual labor for something that all other widget toolkits have.

I would also like a font chooser dialog. Yes I actually have had several projects where one was needed and I had to use some unstable custom dialog I found on the internet.

And what about a dock like in QT? A lot of large program uses such solutions.

...and although its not directly a Swing widget issue, I would also like to see better graphics capabilities built in. For instance support for SVGs and vector graphics, but this is one of the features that are closed and will not be fixed. And why not kill the redrawing issues when first looking into the graphics.

I could also go on and on about the shortcomings of the existing widgets...Java is suppose to be rapid application development (or at least compared to other languages like C and C++), but lets face it: even C++ provide less work nowadays with QT and all. In Swing you have to do a lot of stuff manually because of its limitations, while for instance QT have all that stuff built-in. Dont wanna sound like a QT fanboy or anything, but it is my best example next to .NET :p

This is just my opinion based on my own experiences and the experiences of the people around me. But as most the people I have used to program with on projects and such have left Java because of the Swing issues to go play with .NET I have strong feelings about this issues. The truth is that if people can make the same, if not better, quality apps that I can in less time and with better behavior using .NET, then I may be forced to make the big switch myself. Its all about staying in business.

Edited 2007-12-03 21:56

I mean its not like .NET where if one piece of software runs on .NET 2.0 for example, chances are it wont run on 3.0 at least that is what my understanding is.

Your understanding is wrong. To tell it short: .NET 3.0 is .NET 2.0 + some additional libraries. And 1.1 may coexist on system with 2.0 or later.

Lagging? Not really. Stable? Yes.

There is a lot of discussion about what features go into Java.

To be honest I am starting to believe that Swing is broken beyond repair and that perhaps Sun should consider starting from scratch making a clean widget library. It has become better, and it will become better with the new application framework, but the old issues are still there and can not be removed due to backwards compatibility and such apparently...Swing is anyway you twist it still a compromise in order to provide platform independence: it sucks on all platforms! (ok that is a bit harsh perhaps, but it got issues for sure)

But if they implement closures in Java7 then perhaps its time that they implement a proper event model using closures instead of the current actionlistener-interface model. A new performance tuned and native looking model/view widget library with proper event handling would be sweet.

To be honest, most of the changes I hear suggested to the core language are really stupid, but that is neither here nor there (there are also a few changes I would like to see). But, if people REALLY want them, why don't they just write a pre-processor. If what you want is just syntactic sugar, then that shouldn't be a problem; especially if you know how to write it the long way in Java already (such as list initializers, or tuples). Really, there should be no problem.

There are plenty of parsers out there, the grammar for Java is available -so that gives you a place to start-, and you don't have to worry about compilation... leave that to javac. And with project Schliemann in NetBeans 6.0 you can get pretty editing easily. With a little more work, you should be able to get debugging support within the IDE.

You might want to look at BCEL and Jasmin.

Oh, and if you want more than Swing NetBeans is also a toolkit so maybe they have the widgets you are missing?

Edited 2007-12-03 22:26

One widget I'd love to see is a DATE PICKER for goodness sake. How many people have written a bean to do this???? There should be one already written and included. Speaking of dates...this is one issue that drives me nuts. It should be so much easier to produce and work with dates. I actually liked the deprecated Date class better than the "new" one where I constantly have to create a new "Calendar" to do anything at all.

On the plus side. I love how many commercial/free libraries there are. I can almost always find a pluggable component that I need when I am building specialized applications. For example...working with barcodes, identity management, etc.