• King (unregistered)

    Looks like a Swinger party

  • (nodebb)

    The master has remained way, way behind.

  • (nodebb)

    Clearly because the master knows what he's doing and all the guys who quit were hacks.

  • (nodebb)

    InDiReCtIoN iS cOnFuSiNg. ThE mAsTeR wOuLdN'T ApPrOvE.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Watson

    See @Watson's comment

  • bvs23bkv33 (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    re_public_static_int_main_ed

  • Simon Clarkstone (unregistered) in reply to Jeremy Pereira

    See @Jeremy Pereira's comment.

  • siciac (unregistered)

    That GridBag takes a GridBagLayout is hardly taking OO to the extreme; the way you make a tuple in Java is with a class, and that's all GridBagLayout is.

    The bigger issue with Swing is it's another case of Java inventing a technology and getting bored with it and never updating or improving it.

  • ray10k (unregistered)

    So, no exit interviews were held, or any interviews marking ThE MaStEr as The Problem were just ignored?
    By the standards of the stories on this site, I assume TM was somehow related to some C*O level guy.

  • Torgo (unregistered)

    I take care of the interface while the Master is away.

  • Raj (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    The product has been in the market for many years, so yeah the master knows what he's doing. Odds are the damage done by new hires who want to use the Latest Thing would be far worse (let's do flash! Let's do wxwidget! Let's do a Ajax gui! Let's do an angular Gui! Etc). So until they hire someone who can work with the Master to find a path forward, status quo is their best bet.

  • Wizard (unregistered) in reply to Raj

    Having been in this situation before there rarely is any "working with the Master". The only viable alternative is to move the Master sidewards. Doesn't matter if its into being a Product Owner or out the door so he can work on "open source" products peddling his bad practises. But out he needs to go. Get a proper architect in! (Probably worth getting rid of the Masters boss as well while they are at it - where there's an idiot Dev there's using an equally idiotic Dev Manager who proves the Peter Principle)

    Status Quo is what makes companies go under.....

  • (nodebb) in reply to Raj

    Good point. I think there are 2 extremes, the "don't change anything or death" and "try everything new even if it's obviously stupid" crowds. Measured progress is the golden mean.

  • Raj (unregistered) in reply to Wizard

    I understand, but I've been twice in "let's move the master on the sidelines" situations and both times the new thing was a piece of garbage compared to the original.

    When you get people that know better come in and redesign from scratch, you get the Netscape fiasco. When you accept the wisdom of a somewhat grumpy master, you get Linux.

    It's not about using inline calls, it's about having a product that works keep working. Microsoft has turned a profit every year since 1985, and they updated notepad only twice in this century. How's that for status quo? Second biggest market cap as of now (after Amazon, before Apple).

  • Karl Bielefeldt (github) in reply to Raj

    Swing is old, but it doesn't have to be horrible. There's a big difference between wanting to replace the GUI toolkit altogether and wanting to be allowed to write clean Swing code.

  • Gumpy_Gus (unregistered) in reply to Karl Bielefeldt

    "Write clean Swing code": I forgot to mention, there is no such possibility with Swing. Just getting a text field to stay on the top line and not wildly careen from the left to the right extremes and then off the screen to about Paraguay's opera house, I've spent a week on trying to do just that little bit, with little success. And even if you do get a little bit of code clean and factored and self-documenting, there is a massacre every Thursday when The Master takes over control of your keyboard for "code review". The Horrors! The Horrors!! Code massacre every time.

  • (nodebb)

    The GridBagLayout is a horribly complicated piece of code, and yet it isn't quite complicated enough (because GUI layout is a fiendish problem if you want to to it right; masses of programmers have no idea just how badly they suck at this) and it has some horrible edge cases, such as when you can't quite give a component as much space as it declared it required — a definite possibility when font scaling meets real life screen constraints — and the widget in question just vanishes without a trace. “Nice.”

    Yet there are few alternatives to this if you want a layout that is both pleasing on the eye and actually flexible, at least not unless you have an extremely simple GUI. Witness the horrible things in CSS that are trying to solve the same problem, and often with little more success…

  • I dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯ (unregistered) in reply to Simon Clarkstone

    I agree with @Simon Clarkstone's comment.

  • (nodebb)

    There are some decent layout managers (besides GridBag/et. al.) in Swing. Swing has its problems (often caused by inconsistent interns writing some part of Swing at Sun in the early days), and has now more or less been abandoned by Snoracle (and Sun before that) - although they will not admit it.

    Only about one percent of Java code out there involves Swing (which used to be my speciality) - most is server side code - so many of the devs out there don't have a clue how to write good Swing code having no experience with it and not a lot of up to date info online. But there are still a lot of enterprise siloed apps for special purposes, so some unfortunate soles are still pigeon holed working with Swing.

    I have written some decent Swing desktop shrink wrap apps for certain types of users (e.g., printing industry), but now I mostly don't deal with the UI, much preferring to just write services which are a lot easier to spec, create and maintain.

    Unfortunately, I still have to deal with one Java desktop app that uses a proprietary framework on top of another proprietary framework on top of Swing. And of course, neither framework on top of Swing bothers to use layout managers - all of the layout is hardcoded, fixed and uses its own widgets. So yes, there are worse frameworks than Swing - fortunately most are defunct or obsolete and most people don't have to deal with them.

    Hi DPI displays? Yeah, had to wait for Java 9 and Win 10 - not going to go thru and rewrite all of that hardcoded layout to work on Win 10 - fortunately that wasn't as painful as anticipated, and the users were patient about waiting for it.

  • Mark B (unregistered)

    I agree with Developer_Dude. Any use of GridBag was by someone who didn't want to bother to learn how LayoutManagers worked. I have made a lot of Swing UIs and never once have ever needed to use GridBag.

  • DPI displays (unregistered) in reply to Developer_Dude

    Hi Developer_Dude?

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Wizard

    Creative destruction has only been around for, what, 300+ years in a formal way. The vast majority of (or arguably all) true innovation comes from market disruption, not from current market participants making incremental improvements.

    If you define it carefully, you can say that Microsoft have been producing the same product for decades, except where they've bought up disruptive competitors.

    'Build something new and sell it to Google/Facebook' is a fairly normal business model, further illustrating the point.

    That's not to say you're wrong about what's necessary to buck that trend, but that it's very hard to pull off, not least because it's often actually more profitable to milk something old for all its worth. it may also be a good idea to invest in the eventual replacement, but that's a separate matter.

  • linepro (unregistered)

    The obligitary:

    (Totally Gridbag)[https://youtu.be/UuLaxbFKAcc]

    And yes it was that bad.

  • xtal256 (unregistered)

    "It’s peak Java overcomplification"

    Is it? It's no worse than the "modern" approach of deeply nested HTML divs and flex-box or whatever other CSS layout method is trending.

    In fact, I'd take Swing over HTML any day. Especially since many IDEs have wysiwyg GUI editors, unlike HTML.

  • (nodebb)

    Indirection?

    It was pretty easy, just a flag on the P6 or Q11 digit.

    If course, it was a "special feature" that cost $25/month.

  • Blatavsky (unregistered) in reply to Raj

    Ah, notepad. Which we used to replace with a link to wordpad, since notepad was, and is utter crap. But then, wordpad got an "update" and turned crap, too.

  • (nodebb) in reply to xtal256

    The Cult of DIV was one of the worst things to happen to page design. They've never clued in to the fact that nobody would've kept using tables if DIVs ever worked right.

  • Will (unregistered)

    This is Cisco, isn't it? Their java ui for their routers is terrible.

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