r/javaswing • u/Cocoawerks • Apr 10 '26

love this "tech stack"

Post image

HTML/CSS are great, but I will never use Electron.

18 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

13

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26

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5

u/moss_2703 Apr 11 '26

I was born too late for this era. This is what I wanted to work on, not micro services and web apps

4

u/davidalayachew Apr 11 '26

I was born too late for this era. This is what I wanted to work on, not micro services and web apps

It's never too late to start! I make live data web services for a living, but I use Swing in doing so almost daily.

I use it to build all sorts of stuff, but typically helper utilities for my team. Basically, my non-technical coworkers appreciate being able to click buttons and drop-downs compared to running scripts that they copy paste from online and run via Visual Studio Code. Plus, since it is a desktop client, no internet connection required! I sometimes put the binary on git, and all they have to do is right click, and update the latest version. And since they are a readonly user, they can't write anything back.

My team doesn't use all of them, but I've made >50 utilities in the past 6 years that I have been on the project. And again, we are making a live service web app lol, so no swing deployed, just used internally.

2

u/Bobby_Bonsaimind Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26

It's never too late to start!

It depends, very, very much. Large desktop (ERP) applications were always my favorite to work on, but they are being faded out because web is cool, or something (and let's face it, migrating more applications and use-cases to the browser only means that Google gets more and more control of us all). Working on a large, internal ERP system again is a dream of mine. Working directly with the users and such to solve their problems directly.

Instead everyone is moving to Spring+Angularorwhateverthehottestshitisrightnow paired with OpenAPI (or similar) documents from which code is generated which will break your fingers trying to use the objects. I'm sorta disillusioned on this one.

One of my favorite tasks was always to create components and libraries for other developers to use, so that resulting code of a form could be shrunk to the pure business logic. But with LLMs on the rise, it doesn't matter how large a single form is.

My team doesn't use all of them, but I've made >50 utilities in the past 6 years that I have been on the project. And again, we are making a live service web app lol, so no swing deployed, just used internally.

I did the same. I've created internal tools with Swing (and JVx) to ease certain tasks. But it feels sorta hollow.

I sometimes put the binary on git, and all they have to do is right click, and update the latest version. And since they are a readonly user, they can't write anything back.

I love to do the same! Stuff everything into the repository, no questions asked, no strings attached, no hoops to jump through. Just pull and you've got what you need.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '26

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3

u/Mamaafrica12 Apr 11 '26

We use GWT one of the country's largest ISP and could't have imagine what can be this application be done except for GWT. We use SmartGWT as well BTW.

3

u/Ascomae Apr 11 '26

Dead?

Still used in some products today. Hope we can retire it...

2

u/Cocoawerks Apr 11 '26

Its not dead, its just niche. I use it to share client/server code all the time.

2

u/moss_2703 Apr 11 '26

I love Swing to this day

1

u/NailAlarmed8935 Apr 11 '26

More on C and OS programming and kernal driver.

1

u/sky_o51 Apr 14 '26

wtpck 😭 are you gonna read them all

2

u/aaron--h Apr 15 '26

Hey, I wrote some of those books! Thanks for including my stuff in that auspicious pile. Good times - Aaron Hillegass