Originally posted by Ulf Dittmer:
Welcome to JavaRanch.
I would certainly not count on there being job opportunities for Java desktop development. While a number of desktop apps exist, very few of them are commercial; the only one I can think of is the IntelliJ IDE.
Also the Poseidon UML tool from Gentleware AG. Commercial-quality Java desktop programs that I regularly enjoy include ArgoUML (Poseidon is the commercial adaptation), Eclipse, Freemind and GanttProject.
Originally, programming for the desktop in Java was horrible. AWT wasn't very sophisticated - plus the first version of it didn't scale well. JVM's were horribly bloated things that didn't come bundled with the OS (Thanks, Microsoft!
), and the overhead for an interpreted language was punitive.
Now cheap, powerful hardware makes the "expense" of installing a JVM relatively light and JIT has helped to accelerate interpreted Java to the point where it sometimes outperforms compiled C code. It's no longer a trivial matter to dismiss Java apps on the desktop, though they're not common.
On the other hand, while Linux serves
almost all my needs, one glaring omission has been a decent object-oriented shape-based graphics design tool a la Microsoft Visio. DIA is a sad second-best attempt. I tried to get a group of local people together to do a better product several years ago in C++, but never got anywhwere. More recently I've thought of reviving the effort, and after much careful thought, I think that if I can ever get anything going, it'll be Java-based. Not only the is the code more portable, but you don't get mired down in OS-specific windowing system issues.
[ August 03, 2007: Message edited by: Tim Holloway ]