Some history may help: Up to J6, the window driver (wd) was primarily designed for Windows forms. It worked fine, I wrote several GUIs using it, and the J IDE itself was written using it. There was also a version for Java that was much inferior.
After J6, we felt that wd needed major revision and that we should better support other platforms, particularly with a cross platform UI. At that time, browser based front ends were becoming common and that led to JHS, a browser IDE. For the desktop, we experimented with GTK in J7, initially without any wd support. We then moved to Qt in J8, and have been able to bring wd up to date. This at least explains why many of the original demos and labs became obsolete - they could be reworked, but this wasn't essential. There is a reasonably good sample set in Help|Studio|Qt Demos. The current wd supports most standard Qt controls, so allows building Qt forms from J. Again I think this works fine and entirely adequate for building simple GUIs. For more sophisticated applications you can use any UI and call J. On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 11:47 AM, Joe Bogner <[email protected]> wrote: > To add some evidence to my opinion -- Here's a simple one that I built a > few years ago: http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/User:Joe_Bogner/StockViewer > > I am certainly no expert in J GUI programming, yet I would still be > surprised if a 'better' language at GUI programming yielded significantly > shorter, more clear code, without having to download and learn a bunch of > libraries > > On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 2:36 PM, Joe Bogner <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 10:11 PM, Dabrowski, Andrew John < > > [email protected]> wrote: > > > >> Thanks, that was nice. But I don't think anyone actually believes J is > >> _good_ language for creating GUIs; just a possible one. > >> > >> > > > > I've built a few GUIs in J and have had my share of building applications > > using the Win32 API, gtk, .NET (winforms and XAML), Visual Basic, java > > (desktop and android), TCL/TK, and countless web frameworks. > > > > I do think J is a good language for creating GUIs. It's simple and > > powerful. It reminds me a bit of visual basic with the event handlers > with > > the power of Qt and the everything that comes along with J. It's one of > the > > better and more enjoyable options I've used. > > > > If you haven't tried it, I'd suggest checking out the demos, > documentation > > and try building a simple app. > > > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
