I'm just curious, has any consideration been given to converting the Designer to use JavaFX instead of Swing? It's been around for a decade now, and having worked with both in the past, I can say that it's far superior, both for the developer and end user.
There's some awkward behavior in the Designer that I suspect is due to Swing's clunkiness, such as the project tree's tendency to collapse on its own or jump to a spot far from where I clicked. Several times I've accidentally moved a folder into another simply by trying to navigate within the tree, and every time it happens I worry that eventually it will happen without me noticing and result in breaking something important.
If you understood how much work that would be you'd know that's never going to happen.
And FWIW, Swing isn't any "clunkier" than JavaFX. Awkward Designer behavior isn't the toolkit's fault.
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It might also be fundamentally impossible given that Vision is so coupled to Swing that it basically is just Swing, and the Designer is in some sense a Swing WSIWG editor... at least for the Vision workspace.
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True, there's nothing about Swing that makes such behavior inevitable, but I still say it's "clunky" for the developer. Switching to JavaFX after years of wrestling with Swing's architecture was such a breath of fresh air...
Rewriting the designer into anything is almost certainly never going to happen, but the sad reality of desktop app development means that the "smart" choice for us, as a company, would probably end up being some kind of web technology, not JavaFX, which is basically on life support new development wise as much as Swing is, except not part of the JDK so even more of a danger over the long term.
Yeah, same reaction here. Oy!
I'm not saying I endorse it, just that if such a rewrite ever were to happen (again - it won't) it would be by far the best choice for a brand new Java backed "desktop app" in 2024.
