When I learned Java programming in 1997, the AWT classes were the default way to create graphical user interfaces. The AWT widgets were not very sophisticated and really ugly, so it is no surprise they were replaced by a new widget toolkit, called “Swing”, as soon as possible. At the end of 1998, the Swing graphical API was the default way to develop GUIs for desktop applications on the Java platform.
Today, twenty years later, the Swing API is still part of the Java core SDK and ready for your adventures in GUI creation. But time has taken a toll on the technology. The widgets, once displayed with a state-of-the-art design, look really outdated. Swing introduced the concept of pluggable “Look-and-Feels” (L&F), so you could essentially re-skin your interface with a few lines of code, but all L&Fs look ugly and feel cumbersome now. You can say that Java Swing is a zombie: It is still available and in use in its latest development state, but makes no progress in regard of improvements. If software development follows one rule, it is that software that isn’t actively developed anymore is dead.
My personal date when Java Swing died was the day Chet Haase (author of the Java Swing book “Filthy Rich Clients”) left Sun Microsystems to work for Adobe. That was in 2008. The technology received several important updates since then, but soon after, JavaFX got on the stage (and left it, and went back on, left it again, and is now an optional download for the Java SDK). Desktop GUIs are even more dead than Java Swing, because “mobile first” and “web second” don’t leave much room for “desktop third”. Consequentially, Java FX will not receive support from Oracle after 2022.
But there are still plenty of desktop applications and they won’t go away anytime soon. There is a valid use case for a locally installed program with a graphical user interface on a physical computer. And there are still lots of “legacy systems” that need maintenance and improvements. Most of them are entangled with their UI toolkit of choice – a choice made before 2007, when “mobile first” wasn’t even available as an option.
Because those legacy systems still exist and are used, their users want to experience the look and feel of today’s applications. And this is where the fun begins: You apply makeup on a zombie to let it appear a little bit less ugly than it really is.
Recently, my task was to improve the keyboard handling of a Java Swing desktop application. It was surprisingly easy to add a tad of modern “feel”, and this gives me hope that the zombie might stay semi-alive longer than I thought. As you might already have guessed, StackOverflow is a goldmine for answers on ancient technology. Here are my first few improvements and their respective answer on StackOverflow:
- Let’s suppose you want or need to interact with your application without a mouse or touchscreen. Your first attempt to start an interaction is to press the “menu” key in order to activate the application menu. This would be the “Alt” key on a windows system. For modern applications, your input focus is now at the menu bar. In Java Swing applications, nothing happens. You have to press “Alt” and a mnemonic character to enter a specific menu. If you want to reduce the initial hurdle to just one key, you need to teach all your Java Swing menus to react to the “Alt” key alone: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8659116
- Speaking of focus, in modern applications you can move your focus by using the arrow keys. Java Swing still thinks that “Tab” and “Shift+Tab” is the pinnacle of focus control. If you want to improve the behavior (and therefore the “feel”) of your focus traversal, you can do it globally for your application: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8255423
- And if you want to enable the Return/Enter key for button activation, you can do it with just one line: https://stackoverflow.com/a/440536
If you happen to work on a Java Swing application and want some cheap user experience upgrades, I’ve assembled all the knowledge above into a neat little class that you can use as an add-on utility class: https://github.com/dlindner/java-swing-ux/blob/master/src/com/schneide/swing/ux/KeyboardUX.java
What are your makeup tips for zombies?
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