tornadofx VS compose-multiplatform

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.

So, to add file associations, we need to be able to pass both the .properties file and the --file-associations option. At the time of writing this article, the org.jetbrains.compose plugin doesn't provide such a mechanism. There is an open issue on GitHub that describes a possible workaround, which, unfortunately seems to not work on macOS.

JetBrains has a simplified example of a general-purpose Compose text viewer here: https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform/blob/master/examples/codeviewer/shared/src/commonMain/kotlin/org/jetbrains/codeviewer/ui/editor/Editor.kt


Compose for desktop has a scrollbar component available. You probably can't use that directly on Android, but you could probably steal most of its code.

My company uses https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform to make a desktop app in Kotlin. It's amazing and fantastic. It's basically as mature as using Kotlin in an Android app.

Kamel is an asynchronous media loading library for Compose Multiplatform.

Kotlin Compose Multiplatform is the way to do Desktop apps. https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform

As for missing controls, a common one is a grid. They have built in grids, but again they are built for Android and don't make any sense in a desktop app. There is no simple way to create an Excel-like Data Grid like you might see in Windows Forms, although it can be done. https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform/issues/344.