FlatLaf VS tornadofx

JVM UI isn't so bad. I've written some pretty modern looking UI with it. The sophisticated controls are all there.

Modern JavaFX theme: https://github.com/mkpaz/atlantafx

Modern Swing theme: https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

And these days Compose Multiplatform: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/

I tend to use Kotlin rather than Java but of course Java is perfectly fine too. You can also use Clojure.

If you use any of those frameworks you can distribute to Win/Mac/Linux in one command with Conveyor. It's free for open source apps and can do self-signing for Windows if you don't want to pay for the certificates or the Store (but the Store is super cheap these days, $19 one off payment for an individual). Also supports Electron and Flutter if you want to use those.

From those frameworks you can then access whatever parts of the Windows API you want. Flutter even has WinRT bindings these days! So it's not quite so bad.

FlatLaf, a modern open-source cross-platform Look and Feel for Java Swing desktop applications, brings exciting new features in versions 3.0 and 3.1 🎉 😀

Here’s the link to the “extras” subproject, and there you’ll find a section on the “UI Inspector” tool.

Swing with FlatLaf - https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

Take a look at FlatLAF:

https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

They have done a great job bringing a modern appearance to the Swing components.

Creating your own Look and Feel is a huge task (just look at the size of e.g. the FlatLaf code.

I too find it a bit frustrating at HiDPI. Best I've come up with is to use https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

And as far as Swing's aesthetics, I only agree with the sentiment that 'it's ugly' if a custom LAF isn't used, like one from flatlaf.

And yet, the Kotlin specific bindings for it have seemingly been abandoned, and have not received any updates in years: https://github.com/edvin/tornadofx

Hi, at some point in the past I used mvvmFX and it was pretty nice to work with, but sadly it looks abandoned. So does drombler-fx which I remember looking into around that time. There was also tornado-fx (don't mind doing GUI code in Kotlin) but that's unmaintained now too. All that I could find today is Griffon, although that's clearly slowing down as well.

TornadoFx (JavaFX framework for Kotlin)

P.S. Yes, last official release is Java 8. But we all were using the last snapshot of https://github.com/edvin/tornadofx/tree/jdk10 published to Sonatype in the last years. Or tornadofx2 linked above.

If you are willing to consider Kotlin targeting JVM instead of pure Java, I would definitely recommend you to take a look at tornadofx. I have experience with both frameworks (mvvmfx and tornadofx), and I prefer the latter.