On Dec 9, 2013, at 4:24 AM, Felix Bembrick
<felix.bembr...@gmail.com> wrote:
Spoiler: This is something I have become intensely passionate
about so this is likely to be a long post...
OK, so this (hijacked) thread started out as a discussion of
options in JavaFX for implementing "Look and Feel". I think
everyone agrees that even with CSS and skins, JavaFX lacks the
built-in ability to define a true Look *and* Feel. Further to
this, there has been discussion on Twitter and elsewhere
regarding *native* Look and Feel and the merits of attempting
such an animal with JavaFX.
It is on this topic that I would like to add my 2 bits (as I am
known to do)! I was going to use my blog http://justmy2bits.com
but decided I would be much more likely to be able to engage
fellow JavaFX developers in a positive, polite and respectful
conversation here.
First, anyone who may follow me on Twitter, in this forum or when
I post in other forums (anyone?) will probably be a little bit
confused as to where I actually stand on this issue. Well, this
stems from the fact that I have been giving confusing (if not
conflicting) input into various threads on this topic for quite a
while.
Why?
Well, because until very recently, I myself was completely torn
on the subject of native Look and Feel. In fact, I seemed to
oscillate on an almost daily basis from thinking it's a great,
achievable idea to dismissing such an idea on various grounds. I
am swaying so much because I have so much riding on successful
ports of JavaFX to iOS and Android and because those ports depend
heavily on resolving this issue once and for all.
Now I have had something of an epiphany and reached a
conclusion. I now do not believe that pouring large (massive?)
amounts of resources into the painstaking task of building a
fully compliant, fully performant native Look and Feel is
justifiable or worth the effort. And let's be clear about this:
it is a *lot* of effort!
But before I proceed I just want to say categorically how much I
admire the thoroughly awesome work/efforts of the likes of Pedro
DV, Claudine Zillmann, Hendrik Ebbers et. al. in (trying ever so
hard) to bring native Look and Feel to various OS/platforms with
JavaFX. I cannot put in words how much I am in awe of the
commitment, the attention to detail, the technical prowess, the
artistry and the drive of these fantastic people. Their work
will undoubtedly be extremely useful to many developers worldwide.
I want to make all that *perfectly clear* because now I am going
to explain why I (probably) will not be one of those people and
(hopefully) do it with the utmost respect for the aforementioned
rock stars :-)
Right, so back to the issue of whether to or not to implement or
use a native Look and Feel. Some of the following comments have
already been made by me on other networks and in other forums so
apologies if it seems a bit repetitive to some.
At first glance, the idea of a native Look and Feel seems almost
like the proverbial Holy Grail. I mean, if such a thing were
truly possible and viable, who wouldn't want one? You still have
your single codebase across all platforms and you just just
plug-in the particular native Look and Feel for your target
platform and voila! World domination will surely soon follow!
Well, not quite. It's a great idea but I am going out on a limb
to claim that it has *never* worked. Ever! And by "work" I mean
so that your "not-so-native" app looks and feels (which includes
all aspects of behaviour, not just appearance) *exactly* like a
true native app and *no one* could tell you that it *wasn't* a
native app.
Yes, I know there are masses now screaming at their monitors who
will undoubtedly cite the numerous success stories of Swing apps
or maybe even Qt or some other cross-platform UI toolkit and
maybe my standards/criteria are harsher than others but I stand
by my claim that this has *never ever* really, really, really
worked.
OK, so why not?
Here's my first point: I postulate that such a noble goal is not
actually achievable. It is not actually achievable for a number
of reasons.
It is not actually achievable because, in most cases, we do not
have access to the code that implements the native controls on
each OS so, at best, we are "guessing" when we try to emulate all
aspects of their appearance and behaviour. Try as we may, we
will never get *every* control exactly right and I firmly believe
that anything that purports to be something else needs to be
*identical*.
It is not actually achievable because just as you feel you have
reached an acceptable level of "compliance" (which I again wager
is never 100%), the goal posts will move. That is, the OS vendor
will release an update and even the minor ones can change either
the appearance or behaviour of controls, sometimes in subtle
ways, sometimes in not so subtle ways. Either way, there is then
going to be a period of time where you are playing a futile game
of catch-up and during that time your "native" controls will be
surely exposed for the impostors they are.
It is not actually achievable because the same control on one OS
can look and feel/behave quite differently on another OS which
leads to very poor levels of reuse.
It is not actually achievable because many controls simply can't
be emulated in using Java/JavaFX most likely because they have
exclusive access to native system or OS calls that are not
accessible to Java or because the expected levels of performance
or "snappiness" cannot be achieved using Java by any means. Even
with JNA or JNI you would be left scratching your head in many
cases.
And, it is not actually achievable because it's simply too much
work to get anywhere near to perfection! We are talking
*massive* amounts of effort and very few people have either the
talent, the eye, the attention to detail or the patience to see
such a project right through to the end where *all* controls are
covered. The rock stars I mentioned earlier are the exceptions
of course. There's clearly zero point in emulating *some* of the
controls only; you need the *full set* or it's just not viable.
Finally, and to look at it another way, what do we get even if
some super-human delivers us a native Look and Feel for every
possible platform? Well, a massive maintenance nightmare for a
start! This super-human would basically be spending all their
super time and using up all their super powers just keeping such
libraries current.
So, if you are still with me, why bother? Just consider if all
those rock stars (and super heroes) concentrated all their super
efforts into either improving the features, stability,
performance or appearance of JavaFX itself? Just think what we
could achieve!
And on the why bother theme, why bother to devote all that time
and effort, spend all those millions, tear out all that hair and
hit all those roadblocks when the very thing we are trying to
achieve is already available?
Yes, that's right, if you really, really, really want to build a
native app then why don't you just build a native app? There are
numerous tools, languages, IDEs, toolchains and libraries that
enable you to build awesome *true* native apps! I just don't
think JavaFX is one of them :-)
And it doesn't have to be one of those toolkits because JavaFX
can be used to build an entirely different class of application
and I now strongly believe that this is the kind of app we should
be concentrating on. That class (or classes) of app is one that
is not so heavily dependent on the native Look and Feel and
doesn't need to be. There are probably hundreds of thousands of
apps that are like this. They are everywhere and JavaFX is
*perfect* for them!
Scott Palmer has argued that this approach is not valid (and
sorry Scott if am inaccurately paraphrasing you). He cites
examples such as Chrome, Firefox and even MS Office as proof that
this approach does not work. However, my response to that would
be to say that just because these are examples of where the
developers got it seriously wrong, they do not prove that this
approach can't work and isn't working all over the marketplace.
There is no need to develop crappy, mistake ridden software by
using a toolkit such as JavaFX in a way that does not attempt to
emulate the native Look and Feel and the fact that even big
companies like Google *still* clearly get it horribly wrong
doesn't imply that we *all* have to be so ineffective.
Part of my newly-found aversion to emulated native Look and Feel
comes from my many years of both developing and using Swing
applications. Sure, I know there are *some* (handful?)
successful Swing apps, most notably those developed with the
NetBeans RCP, but in general Swing has failed to have any
penetration into serious commercial software. Why? Well, there
are several reasons (and a lot are due to Java itself) but, for
me, I was never satisfied with the so-called native Look and Feel
options that come with Swing. I have been (and still am) very
critical of the Windows Look and Feel in Swing in particular
because, even today, there is a vast gulf between an actual
native Windows application and a Swing application with this Look
and Feel. So much so that I still want to almost knock my
monitor off the desk when I am using an application developed in
this way. For me, this is not acceptable and such an application
could never be released as a serious commercial product.
And that's pretty much what this all boils down to: developing
serious commercial software.
If you are interested in developing something else then these
lengthy comments (am I *still* going?) probably do not apply to
you :-)
So to summarise, I argue that it is not possible to develop
serious commercial software using emulated Look and Feel in
JavaFX or in *any* UI toolkit. I *strongly* recommend that we
all work together to make JavaFX as good as it can be (which is
absolutely awesome) by focusing on the core product, the API, the
performance, the feature set, the stability *and* the supported
platforms rather than throw good money after bad on a *wonderful*
goal that ultimately can never be reached...
Just my 2 bits,
Felix
P.S. I surely hope I have not offended any/all those who either
disagree with the main points or who still believe that native
Look and Feel is viable. I remind you all that I am on my knees
bowing with respect to the rock stars I referred to and anyone
else working on similar projects. Absolutely no offence is
intended, I am merely expressing my (passionate) feelings on this
subject.
On 9 December 2013 19:10, Felix Bembrick
<felix.bembr...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 9 December 2013 16:10, Scott Palmer <swpal...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Dec 8, 2013, at 9:18 PM, Felix Bembrick
<felix.bembr...@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
Firstly, it will *never* be possible to completely emulate the
native look
and feel.
Sure it is. Though it may never be practical, for many of the
reasons you have given.
My reasoning is: why bother?
Because it matters. As computer literate developers, we often
don't realize what trips other people up. I get so frustrated
with apps these days because they have become hard to use
simply because the developers tried to define their own look
and feel. For example, Chrome and Firefox... Or Microsoft
Office...
Where did the title bar go in chrome?
Where have all the menus gone in Chrome, Firefox andOffice? I
can find them, but when I have to play tech support over the
phone to my parents these changes are massive problems. I ask
my dad to move he window by dragging the title bar (please
don't ask why he doesn't know to do this himself after decades
of computer use) and he says "there is no title bar"... I the
remember that yes, chrome did that... They got rid of a
standard concept in the OS' windowing system and screed the end
users.
These apps became harder to use because of this "innovation" in
the UI.
Contrast this with applications on OS X where getting the UI
right has always been an important priority for developers.
Because adhering to the system look and feel has always been
strongly encouraged the system is much easier to use.
These days, many apps do not look 100% native and may have
their own
controls or look and feel in general.
Yes, but to what end? They are now more difficult to use.
Why not channel all that massive
effort in constructing an emulated native look and feel into
simply making
JavaFX better overall?
But I agree here. The general look isn't the main issue.. E.g.
little variations in color and minor tweaks to a few pixels
here and there don't really matter. What does matter is when
you change the order of buttons, like Okay & Cancel which have
standard places that are different between Mac and Windows, or
you move the About menu item from the Application menu on an OS
X app to the help menu! because that is where you find it on
Windows. Those things matter.
Scott
Felix
On 9 December 2013 12:35, Pedro Duque Vieira
<pedro.duquevie...@gmail.com>wrote:
Thanks!
@Jasper: Yes, that's very interesting! Forgot that was
possible to do in
CSS.
On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:15 AM, Stephen Winnall
<st...@winnall.ch> wrote:
It may be possible to change the LOOK with CSS, but not the
FEEL, which
is
where Java apps have traditionally failed big time.
Some things that I don’t think can be changed with CSS:
1) texts
2) order of buttons
3) escape characters for shortcuts
4) menus
5) system-level stuff (double-clicking on files, dropping
files on
applications, …)
6) filesystem conventions
7) ...
I think FXML can fix some of these, but not all. So it seems
to me that a
LaF in JFX will consist of at least:
- one or more CSS files
- one or more FXML files
- some plumbing at the system level
It would be nice to have a set of proper LaFs for each major
platform
with
an appropriate common API.
Steve
On 9 Dec 2013, at 00:20, Jasper Potts
<jasper.po...@oracle.com> wrote:
You can set skin classes from CSS so should be able to do
everything
you
could with Swing and more. With just a CSS file and skins as
and when
needed.
Jasper
On Dec 8, 2013, at 3:00 PM, Jonathan Giles
<jonathan.gi...@oracle.com
wrote:
At present there are no plans to introduce any further
API or
functionality in this area, but if there is something you
are wanting
then you should file feature requests in Jira.
-- Jonathan
On 9/12/2013 11:54 a.m., Pedro Duque Vieira wrote:
Hi,
Is there any Look and Feel mechanism in place, like the
one in Swing?
That
doesn't appear to exist..
Are there any plans to add one? You can only do so much
with CSS...
Thanks in advance, best regards,
--
Pedro Duque Vieira
