Java Still the Ugly Duckling

I had heard that the Windows look and feel had been improved in the more recent releases of Java, so I decided to download the developer’s kit for the Java 1.5 Release Candidate and have a look myself. In the true JDK tradition, a number of impressive samples accompanied the kit. The 2D sample demonstrates smooth animation, clipping, composition and a number of other effects.



The old Swing set demo was also present. Curious about graphical and behavioural changes, I quickly selected the Windows look and feel to see what, if anything, had changed.



At first glance, the interface looked a lot like other Windows XP applications. However, menus did not render with the user-selected effect (in my case smooth fading), and MDI child windows felt slow to move around. This suggests that Swing retains its custom drawing routines and still does not map to the standard Windows controls. I think this is unfortunate, because nothing annoys me as much in user interfaces as applications that just don’t quite “feel right”.
I know a lot of people feel that the Swing library was over-engineered. I was never particularly bothered by the class design in Swing — on the contrary, the flexibility and elegance appealed to me. I think if Sun would have aimed for an ambitious mapping to the Win32 API right from the start (I do not count AWT as “ambitious”), they would have had a winner on their hands. As it is, I feel like they missed the boat. I’m not going to weep anymore about what could have been, and should have been. Instead I’ll just continue happily using the .NET Framework whenever and wherever I get the chance.