skija VS HumbleUI

I think IntelliJ was built on Swing and predates JavaFX… however, I’m curious if they’ve got plans to integrate their Skia integration work that backs desktop compose: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija

Maybe the story is not finished yet. New approaches like JetBrain's Compose (https://www.jetbrains.com/de-de/lp/compose-mpp/) with a React inspired programming model might bring some new interest to the platform. Then there is a Java binding library for Skia (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija), and JavaFX is also alive and high quality.

As everyone is used to fat Electron apps now, Java applications (especially compiled and packed with new JDK features) might be refreshing.

I think it's the core, the 2D engine, just never got the love it needed to be a great place to start. Nobody seemed to prioritize making that happen.

Like, the antialiasing was noticably fuzzy. I never found an applet that looked like it belonged on the webpage. And when I built a few, it was a lot of work to even get font rendering to not be horrendous. And even then, you'd see what the browser rendered vs what the applet rendered and they were always off. I remember using images instead of font rendering sometimes.

So, if you made a swing app, it was easy to put together, but hard to make look "professional".

By the time of the Oracle acquisition, I'm pretty sure everyone just realized "the browser won" and that's why we just had JavaFX get broken off the platform and basically put out to pasture. But it's not like much went into the core platform itself to make building great UIs easy. The underlying 2D rendering just never worked efficiently.

I mean, even today, there's some serious performance issues with IntelliJ on 4k monitors with scaling. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

When I look at where JetBrains is going, it sure seems like they are building on top of a better 2D engine, in this case, skia: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija.

Under the covers it uses Skija which is a java wrapper for Skia which is a C++ 2D graphics engine (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija)

You can take a look at Skija from Jetbrains. It's a wrapper around the Skia library used by Chrome, Xamarin, LibreOffice, among others.

Technically, the bot is written in Kotlin using Ktor and Koin. It's a single endpoint web service, listening for Telegram Bot API webhooks. Text is drawn using Oswald font (I need Cyrillic, not supported in Anton) with Skija library, a Java wrapper for Skia, a 2D library powering your phone and browser. It is really cool and next time you need to make something with graphics, consider using Skia and its wrapper for your language. Next, generated images are upload to Imgur via its API (the documentation could be better). The whole thing is running on a free VM in Oracle Cloud. So, yeah, next time you need to host something lightweight — check out their offering. Oracle also provides a free DB instance, which I'm using to cache the links. Monitoring: Grafana Cloud (also free). Deployments: GitHub Actions + Ansible. So it didn't cost me a penny, except for ~50 hours of coding in two weeks on the evenings.

So you can see, there are really a lot of choices but none of them dominates, which means they all have flaws. You can read a good article from Niki Tonsky where Clojure UI problems are discussed. Also to address the problems Niki Tonsky started the development of a new UI for Clojure, called Humble UI. So now we have one more option :)

If you don't mind being stuck on Windows you could use Visual C# or Visual Basic, they have edit-and-continue too. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/edit... I've worked with the SuperTux C# level editor in the past. C# was actually pretty nice for GUI stuff.

There doesn't seem to be a good GUI framework for Clojure. There was Seesaw but it hasn't been updated since 2019. There is a guy developing a new framework https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/ but it's WIP. I guess you could sidestep this by making it a webapp and using figwheel.

UI toolkits: https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI and https://github.com/phronmophobic/membrane

Nikita Prokopov is developing Humble UI which is worth keeping a close eye on. (Yes, it's Clojure, but Java interop is bound to emerge if it builds up a critical mass and catches on.)

https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/

I've made a few desktop apps in https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx (e.g., https://www.chronos-desk.com/), and cljfx (JavaFX + Clojure) is amazing and makes for rapid development, not to mention fun. I'm keeping an eye on https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI, which promises to be a step up.