Focus People, Focus !

There's a post on Jonath Giles blog proposing a new version of Java Swing, which he refers to as Swing 2.0 . In a nutshell he believes that there exists a need for a proper swing upgrade/replacement which is not JavaFX based. An upgrade containing:

• Generics Based models
  
• Support for Enumerations
  
• Support for varargs
  
• Stricter enforcement of event dispatch thread rules
  
• Improved support for bean binding and validation.
  

Now these are all good ideas and wholeheartedly supported these ideas three days ago when I posted my reply. I was even willing to help with the project and had ideas about where we could start. But now I'm not too sure about the whole idea.

If I could wave a magic and wand and conjure a Swing 2.0 with all of these features would I ? Swing is complex, little tricky to learn, and even trickier to get right. JavaFX is much easier to learn and getting enough exposure in the java world that it might just succeed and take hold. If JavaFX is a real contender to that RIA crown do we really want Swing2.0 diverting precious attention and developer mindshare away from it ?

Given an choice of successfull JavaFX and a new better Swing I think I'd plump for the former. If we don't support JavaFX what are we left with?

That horrid html/css/javascript stack that poses for a GUI, what we'll be left with. *Shudder*