Scala UI futures
Scala is an impressive and
forward-looking language. Except for those of us who need to build a
UI. Why is the
Scala community investing in an old-fashioned UI like Swing? Swing just
doesn't cut it in the modern world of Flex/Silverlight/JavaFX. These
support a declarative scenegraph instead of procedural
rectangular composition. F#+Silverlight has that today. The obvious
solution is to wrap JavaFX's internal API's to enable its usage from
Scala. But I can find no evidence that anyone is doing that, perhaps
because Sun is not supporting those interfaces, and actively breaking
them. There is a preliminary effort
in Groovy. Or perhaps give up on Sun and build a portal to Flex.
One way or another, something beyond Swing is
needed to build state of the art UI's with Scala. It is the only thing
stopping me from adopting Scala.
[There is no point in debating the merits of Swing here. The fact is
that
developers have been voting with their feet for a long time, and even
Sun is investing in an alternative now. Whether fairly or not, Swing is
now a dead end.]
