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A short history of Web UI programmingPosted by evanx on June 26, 2008 at 7:18 AM PDT
Web 1.0, XUL, Ajax, Laszlo, Flex and Silverlight have a common approach - declare the UI view using markup (HTML or XML), and use JavaScript to handle the UI events and manipulate the UI. JavaFX/Swing is a notable exception - which is exciting and/or risky?! 'Cos Web developers know and love JavaScript and HTML, so XML plus JavaScript is right up their alley. If you're a Java UI programmer, there's GWT, Wicket and Echo. And with a great new Java plugin in the works, maybe Swing applets will be considered again in some quarters? But all web developers know JavaScript, and not necessarily Java, Groovy, et al, so probably JavaScript/Swing is a better bet than Java/Swing? Imagine having an XML schema for a flashy JavaFX/Swing toolkit, call it JavaFXml, with great JavaScript bindings, so make that JavaScriptFXml ;)
HTML, CGI, Perl
JavaScript, DHTML
Java Applets
PHP
Java JSPs, Servlets
XUL
Ajax
Laszlo
Flex
Silverlight
JavaFX
Everything from HTML, through to XUL, Ajax, Laszlo, Flex and Silverlight, have a common approach, namely let's declare the UI view using markup (HTML or XML), and use JavaScript to handle the UI events and manipulate the UI.
With a great new Java plugin in the works, and other JavaFX-induced improvements for client-side Java, maybe Java/Swing applets will be the preferred option for many of the Java programmers out there, rather than moving to one of the available scripting languages on the JVM eg. JavaScript, Groovy, JRuby, JPython, JavaFX Script? If we want JavaFX/Swing to succeed in the browser, surely we need a GUI tool to design those flashy UIs, generate XML, and be scriptable using JavaScript first, and otherwise Groovy, Java et al, for programmers that prefer those other JVM languages.
Taking a cue from the cutting-edge of EJB3/Seam programming, last week i wrote an article titled "Gooey MVnC" proposing a convention-over-configuration MVC framework for Swing GUIs - to eliminate boilerplate and glue code for beans binding, events and tasks. Everytime i revise that article, i might write a new blog entry, like this one, just so that i can link to it again, which is precisely the reason why i was inspired to write this blog entry!
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Java Desktop Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)
Submitted by felipegaucho on Mon, 2008-06-30 03:57.
HTML is a disgrace of the modern computer era.. invented in the pre-historical age, it was designed only for rendering hyper-linked documents.. with time, the industry abandoned the research about better formats and nowadays all the universe is trying to emulate rich contents through html simple tags...Our next chance will be the Digital TV programming, and I hope we don't see HTML printed in the TV screens ;)
Submitted by o_watkins on Tue, 2008-07-01 04:06.
"'Cos in any event, the visual aspects of an UI should be designed by designers, using a GUI builder tool, rather than programmed by a programmer?"
I don't agree with this. I also don't agree with having XML layouts to define the screen. Using a GUI builder is fine for protyping and kickstarting a GUI project... or very simple programs.
Having a markup assumes that the screen is static. I have built dozens of Swing apps, where this is not so. That is, I press a button or something in a dialog, and that modifys an array of controls below it. You can't model this type of behaviour in an XML file.... well you could use two XML files, but then you break inheritence, and all the yummy good stuff you get in OO.
When are all these AJAX clowns going to learn that a GUI is object oriented? Having designers build a complex desktop app is very naive thinking.
Submitted by evanx on Tue, 2008-07-01 04:23.
owatkins, i hear you, but the majority of majority of GUIs are fairly static. That doesn't preclude the controller from modifying the GUI, and adding/removing dynamic bits and pieces in event handlers - that's what the UI "controller" is for. Also components might be designed on the form but start off not visible.
But your point that this doesn't play nicely with OO is well made. Typically then only the UI controller can get OO/inheritance.
Still, GUI designers enable non-programmers, learners, etcetera to get up and running quickly and therefore are essential for adoption, rather competing platforms and languages. And as you say for rapid prototyping and kickstarting projects.
Also one should (ideally) be able to separate UI design concerns from programming - eg. a dedicated UI designer might build and tweak all the UIs in an application, independently of the controller/logic et al.
Submitted by o_watkins on Wed, 2008-07-02 08:45.
I agree with you Evan that most GUIs are fairly static, particularly coming from the web side of things, but I just think its a step backwards using declarative XML for building GUIs.
A while back I used Matisse in Netbeans, and while I found it was fantastic from a visual perspective, what it generated was very rigid and brittle. The Java code generated seemed ok, but Netbeans would not allow me to edit it, and it also generated an XML file intrinsically linked to the GUI. There was a lot of fancy stuff that I just could not do after that... it's probably improved now.
It would be nice to have some kind of GUI declarative XML that could phase in and out from XML to OO implementation. Say I have some hierarchical XML describing a frame with panels and buttons... but at a later point I think, I would really like to reuse a sub-panel (and possibly extend in other situations). Then at that point a chunk of the XML would surrender itself to OO implementation. However OO going the other way to XML is more difficult... and it would have to conform to naming/design conventions. I know this has been done a million times before... but some kind of adjustable floating barrier is needed to seperate the OO code from the XML declaration.
Submitted by evanx on Wed, 2008-07-02 13:17.
owatkins, yes, i agree with you and thank you for your discussion :) It is an interesting issue that is often overlooked and underdesigned, for XML/UI "companions" to Java classes (and other externalised resources, eg. .property files) to also inherit (from that of the superclass) and be overridable (from that of the superclass), so as not to break the capability of the class itself to be subclassable, or at least not make this any less trivial than it should be.
Submitted by ddmarx on Sat, 2008-06-28 08:11.
OpenLaszlo does offer some support for compiling to DHTML, though that is still in beta until the release of OpenLaszlo 4.1. Currently, production support is available for compiling OpenLaszlo to SWF7 or SWF8 with SWF9 on the way.
Submitted by evanx on Fri, 2008-06-27 08:00.
that does sound interesting. JavaSwingBuilder uses YAML markup for construct Swing GUIs.
I believe that UI views should be created by UI designers using GUI builder tools, rather than hand-coded. In that case, it doesn't really matter what markup language/schema is used, but having a standardised schema for describing Swing GUIs might be helpful - call it JavaFXml ;) With animations, transitions et al.
But that'd only be useful if a graphical builder supported it eg. Netbeans, so that UI people could drag and drop, point and click, and not have to code it.
Then have nice UI bindings for javascript, and also java et al, to handle UI events and update the UI - where this would be coded of course, by programmers, in the language of their choice - and i imagine scripting languages like javascript et al might be more popular than java. Oh, and automatic beans binding to make programming the UI even simpler.
Submitted by gkbrown on Fri, 2008-06-27 09:02.
> one wonders if the JavaFX initiative shouldn't have embraced Javascript with an XML thingymajig also, like Microsoft (XAML) and Adobe (MXML) saw fit to do, rather than introducing a new scripting language?
That's exactly what we've tried to do with Pivot:
https://pivot.dev.java.net/
Submitted by evanx on Fri, 2008-06-27 09:49.
greg, pivot looks like a tremendous effort, and i look forward to trying the demos again on firefox3 with the upcoming new j6u10 plugin! :)
Submitted by gkbrown on Fri, 2008-06-27 11:04.
Cool - we've been testing Pivot in the FF3/j6u10 betas, and we are also looking forward to the final release!
Submitted by kingsleydavies on Fri, 2008-06-27 03:44.
So, as far as I'm aware as of version 4 OpenLaszlo can cross compile/generate either ajax or flex code. I guess the natural move would be for it to also be JavaFX compatible too before being declared the Lord of the Web UI languages (if only this was a post about network admin languages, it could've been called 'Lord of the Pings'.. anyway). One language to generate them all sounds pretty precious to me !
Incidentally, the OpenJX project sounds pretty interesting to this end too:
https://openjx.dev.java.net/
Cheers
Submitted by varan on Thu, 2008-06-26 13:22.
Too late for swing for the web.
The zk (http://www.zkoss.org) type approach is the best one at this time, in that you don't want to, you don't have to deal with javascript or even xml or html, and can do everything in Java. It is surprising that neither Yahoo's nor Google's open frameworks is that easy. Sun is inexplicably trying to invent yet another language rather than make a better ZK type framework.
I have no relationship with zk except that I have a good opinion of it.
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Anyway, let's look at the short history of web programming...
Flash
Given the predilection of web developers towards JavaScript
and XML, one wonders if the JavaFX initiative shouldn't have embraced JavaScript with an XML thingymajig also,
like Microsoft (XAML) and Adobe (MXML) chose to do, rather than introducing a new scripting language? 'Cos in any event, the visual aspects of an UI should be designed by designers, using a GUI builder tool, rather than programmed by a programmer?
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