? Stand-Alone Appl. Example to Download

[Pontelo]

I´m an old Clipper programmer developing commercial application. Clipper, DOS are old tools and I have to decide where to go from here. Java seemed to be a very good choice. I think Linux will explode in next 10 years and our systems must run anywhere. But one of my crucial doubt is about performance. I downloaded SunOne, NetBeans IDE (got 2 books) and got scared. They take 5 minutes to get ready in my PIII 550MHz with 256MBRam (WinXP)! My God, I thougth, all our customers will kill us if we put an applicattion and they can go drink a coffe while it is going to run.
Where can I download some stand-alone application developed in java to "feel" they performance ?
What do you, experts, can tell us about performance, compared to Delphi, that is the most common tool used to develop commercial applications I´ve found around me ?
Thank You !

 

[palbano]

Almost no commercial (shrink wrap) Windows desktop applications are being developed in Java for the very reason you expressed. There is an alternative graphics library to awt and swing being offered by the Eclipse project. Reportedly the library leverages the native GUI services directly and is therefore faster. I have not personally evaluated this yet so I cannot confirm nor deny the claims.

C++ is still the dominant windows commercial development language. I believe the last time I checked IDC still reported Microsoft Visual C++ as the number one used tool to develop commercial windows applications.

For enterprise development you will find all sorts of tools being used like Delphi and VB since enterprise apps have less stringent requirements and they require a lower skill level entry point and a faster (RAD) development environment.

For Windows environments, and perhaps more, the .NET CLR platform will likely move into the mainstream for desktop application development in the enterprise space in the next several years. Will it ever reach the commercial space? I won't guess at that but the possibility is certainly there.

-pete

 

[sem]

In fact Java is mostly used for the server side applications, not using GUI. IDE may be written in any language. Eclipse, written in Java, is much faster than NetBeans (and is also free). You may also look at IntelliJ IDEA.

Regards, Dima

 

[idarke]

The last I heard Eclipse is abandoning their propietary ways and moving back to AWT/Swing.

You can't really judge the speed of a java GUI by the loading time of an IDE. IDE's are enormous applications.

Put in perspective, when I load Photoshop, I go to the bathroom while I wait for it to load, and it's certainly not written in java. It's just an enormous app.

I wrote an average GUI app in java ( about 20 screens ). It takes around 15 seconds to load on my pentium II. I used a product called Excellsior Jet to convert the app to a native EXE and ended up increasing the load time by 50%, and once loaded it doesn't really run that much faster.

In short, java had a serious performance problem once, but the Swing bundled with 1.4 is much faster. I don't consider it an issue now.


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improbable, must be the truth." ~ Arthur Conan Doyle