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Programming Language for Corporate UI Research?
Daniel Wigdor asks: "I'm a PhD candidate doing an internship at a major American UI research lab. They distribute an input/output hardware device to research labs, along with a Java API for the development of 'concept pieces' (here's an example from a university). Java was chosen because it was simple, and seemed, at the time, to be the language of choice for UI researchers in both the corporate and academic worlds. There is now pressure to switch from Java to C#, since they don't have the resources to maintain an SDK for both. We're not at all concerned with system performance, since this is only for concept-development: it's really just about accessibility for newcomers to the hardware. Given that, what would the community advise by way of a choice between Java and C#?"
Carry on using Java if you can, and switch if you have to. No point in changing language if you can avoid it (especially given how similar Java and C# are).
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
What's the difference?
If you're not concerned with performance, and you're in an academic environment, why not use a language like Ruby or Lisp?
I realize that this probably isn't the kind of thing you were expecting (I'm guessing you expected to get answers like "C++"), but I think it's a good idea.
But of the two languages that you have now, I would stick with Java simply because it is completely cross platform (plus just about everyone getting out of school now knows Java because it was so popular/"language of the future", where as many don't know (or have only had an introduction to instead of a large amount of work with) C#.
But the great thing about Python is you could use it as an itermediary between toolkits and such. Without changing your API, you could replace the Python code so that it used Win32 instead of Swing or QT without making your users learn something new. You want to change the back end from C++ to C or to something else, the interface and the way they call things stays EXACTLY the same.
Just a though, from a guy who has recently discovered and fell in love with Python. And things will only get better with Python 3.0!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Or Visual Basic. Seriously. If I'm reading the question right, the SDK is going to be .NET IL (written from C#), and you don't care about performance of the UI above that - you just want to experiment with different interfaces with little learning curve for new researchers. Sounds like VB.NET would work fine.
C#/CLR is nice and has promise, but if you want UI consistency I would suggest sticking with Java/Swing for the meantime. With C#/CLR you have to pick between Microsoft's Windows Forms implementation, or Mono. As far as I know, Mono has an incomplete Windows Forms implementation at this time, and even if becomes complete I would expect at least some minor UI differences. At the current time I believe Mono has independent GTK, QT, etc. bindings. So if UI consistency is what you want, I'd stick with Java/Swing, and the default cross platform metal/ocean theme.
If and when Mono implements Windows Forms fully, so that they are sufficiently similar, you may want to re-evaluate at that time (depending on whatever other factors would influence your chioce).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You're asking Slashdot, where anti-MS sentiment is a given? Good luck getting anyone to recommend C#.
.NET, in general) on Mac and Linux is likely to play continual catch-up a la WINE, I'd say stick with Java. It has much wider support in terms of development environments, giving researches flexibility in their choice and tools.
Actually, if C# was supported under other platforms as well as it is under Windows, then I'd say, go forit.
However, since C# (and
When in doubt, go where there's more flexibility.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I put my vote on assembly. Sort the men from the boys.
C# is powerful in the right hands, but you loose platform independence. (Mono isn't there yet IMHO)
Pluspoints for Java
.NET languages
--------------------
+ more OS Platforms that you can run on
+ Eclipse as a terrific free IDE
+ huge number of free open source libraries
+ further away from MS (O.K. there is Mono too, but you only have one single second vendor that you can rely on)
Pluspoints for C#
-------------------
+ one single choice for UI development
+ more language features (this may be a minuspoint for corporate development, when you only want one way to write things)
+ one language standard, less dialects
+ believe it or not, it's an open standard and (on paper) less proprietary than Java, which is owned by Sun
+ easy GUI development for WinCE or windows mobile, including many mobile phones
+ possible easy interaction with other
+ easy direct interaction with Windows OS features
Now what do you prefer?
db4o - open source object database for Java and
Personally, i think that there is much to commend C# as a language, but I think you'll find that those pushing for C# are really pushing the .Net framework rather than the language. While I think it is one of the best things that Microsoft have come up with, it is not portable and unless you wish to have code that runs purely on Windows, Java is the way to go.
The advantage of Java is that it has a standard API that is tailored to multiple platforms.
If you are doing UI concept R&D I would think that you would want to be platform independent. Despite all the posturings about Mono, it seems to me that Java is the leader in that area.
You said about Java API? What is the language the implementation itself is written in? From my experience it is importnat to have API in the sam language as implementation first and then have APIs. You also did not describe motives behind the pressure. What are they? Technological, financial, Microsot grants ... what? That would help in answering your question.
Changing anything will cost your employer money. Did they count how much reqrite will take in terms of time and money.
If you have to support several APIs, I'd say write IDL and generate interfaces for as many languags as you want. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it supposed to be.
my sstream of consciousness
If you'd like to develop new ideas in UI's and really experiment with different ways to handle them, probably neither Java nor C# will really help much.
But squeak (a smalltalk implementation) might. You should at least give it a serious look. Of course there are other possibilities (self, raw X windows...) but squeak looks like a good one to me.
If you switch, and start using C#, you'll be stuck using Microsoft Windows for most things. Although there is Mono, if Microsoft ever goes berserk and starts suing them over "patent violations" that'll cause real problems for you.
If you stick with Java, you can move pretty freely between Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X, and *BSD.
With C#, I believe you're more limited.
Additionally, I believe that many more companies offer Java development environments than offer C# environments; with C#, aren't you pretty much limited to Microsoft and Mono? With Java, you can go with Borland, IBM, Sun, even Oracle, and I'm sure there are others as well as "Free Software" implementations.
Just my two cents; this isn't a Microsoft bashing, by the way, it's just a matter of flexibility. Java gives you more flexibility than C#, so I'd stick with it.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I've you're used to Java's SWING layouting, you'll find C#/.NET ridiculous and primitive.
In .NET, you only have one, fixed layouting mechanism which uses either "Dock" or "Anchor" (read specifics in MSDN's Control class documentation, specifically the "Anchor" and "Dock" properties).
If you're doing UI prototypes I really think that this is a severe limitation.
Other arguments against C#:
Do what skype did. Implement the essence of your application in whatever you see fit. They used c because they needed performance. Then they go round and use the best GUI toolkit on every platform. Objective-C + Cocoa on the mac. Delphi / VCL on windows, QT on linux (ok arguable choice). The clients are very pretty and excellently integrated on all the platforms, for example the mac version uses a drawer like interface for current calls and uses a little translucent notification window on incoming calls with buttons for answer and hangup.
That being said, wxWidgets works on most platforms and you can program it well from many languages like ruby, python, all the c's, c# and so on.
My advice is to stick with what you've got now. That advice would also apply if you were using C# and wondering about switching to Java.
.NET equivalents to your scriptable Ant software build scripts, retrained people and maybe pissed off a few in the process, etc.) a lot more than $0
Honestly, the two languages are close enough in terms of capability that it really boils down to the cost and effort involved in switching.
Cost to remain with Java: $0
Cost to switch to C#: (by the time you've recoded all your "trivial" common routines you've created to work within your particular environment, built
Speak to people who've worked a lot with both languages. Get them to rank both languages out of 10 in terms that are relevant to you. Average the scores across a bunch of people. If C# averages >1.5 more than Java, then consider switching
If you stick with Java, you can use Java language compilers from many different vendors, including gcc, and your code will be portable between many different Operating Systems.
Java is more stable and mature, has a huge developer community and is supported by enormous, comprehensive class libraries.
Stick Men
UI Research is a pain in the ass in Java or C#. It's a pain in the ass in any language that makes you work to reinvent.
I perform UI experiments largely with pygame, or perl-SDL. It gives me a chance to rapidly try out USER interface changes as I don't have to worry about whether or not delegation is "easy enough" to facilitate the change.
With Java and C# (or C++ for that matter) you've got an awful lot of work building classes and inheritance and if experimentation demonstrates a particular (unexpected!) trend, you've got an awful lot of work ahead of you to refactor and rework existing paths to make the new paths possible.
'consider that Microsoft has not given Mono a legal blessing'
IANAL, and I have myself had reservations about this point...
However, it seems quite unlikely that MS would succeed in choking off core (C# + CLR) Mono development - for a lot of little reasons:
1. Novell appears to be Mono's primary backer and they appear to have real patent leverage w.r.t. MS.
2. Probably not many of the patents covering the core can hold water due to prior art. I think it's been suggested that MS + Sun together could launch a more effective patent attack. How likely is that? (things like WinForms, ASP, ADO would seem to be in greater danger)
3. Mono could still ship with the odd feature stripped or workaround mechanism in place.
4. MS can not simply beat up on who it feels like nowadays; not with the EU and others breathing down it's neck.
As an aside, can anyone think of a *language* implementation that was killed by patent litigation?
--
Mike Greaves
-- Mike Greaves
This is *hardware* UI they're talking about. They're not talking about Swing or Win.Forms. They want to know which platform has the better I/O API.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Slightly anoying are the answers I saw where the amount of available bindings for Python are enumerated and QT or OpenGL come to speak.
:D
.NET, GTK bindings, QT, QT bindings plus the desired scripting language. Whats with mono for the Mac BTW? All the nice Scripting languages for the Java Virtual Machine run on my Mac as well.
....
/. suggested in switching to a "better" language and have endless bindings, the more work you will spend in configuring those systems instead on improving them.
Probably the authors of such posts should at least have watched the video?
Back to topic:
I suggeest to stick with Java for several reason:
a) why dropping a succesfull existing system because of language?
b) why forcing all people allready working with it to learn a new language/environment (libraries and such)
c) you likely get FAR MORE developers (researchers) for Java based software than for e.g. Python
There are people like me who simple never would touch Python.
Why the crowd may ask? I simply can't cope with the syntax. I hate it, I have an awersion against it. I can't stand it that as soon as you try to some meta level stuff everything is done with full capitalized variables starting with __. I cant understand why you have to declare the "this" pointer in each method, called self -- by convention, instead of simply "having one" like in C++/Java. Its a dynamic typed language, I simply can't work with something like that. Thats just me, but there ARE programmers LIKE me, who simply hate languags liky Python and e.g. TCL.
d) Java has enough bindings to scripting languages like Groovy, TCL, Python(Jython), Ruby(JRuby) and a lot of others. It is far better to keep your "kernel" in Java and let the users descide if and how they put additional services or "experimental software" on top of it. So all the guys yelling Python is so much better can use it without blocking me from using Java
Switching to C# gives no new options, but just different ones and IMHO far less mature ones.
Lets look at platforms, in case you want to use a scripting language with such a binding to access your software written in C#: Installing software on a machine allready having Java is merly a download/copy process. C# based software (or GTK/Qt) OTOH needs on Windows likely to be "installed" and the user needs admin rights. For a geek it is easy to install Qt or GTK on HIS OWN windows machine as well as on any other machine/OS he has the rights to. But a PC pool in a university likely has more rigid management.
However for a cross university developemnt process, its better to stick with something simple, where not every PC, Linux or BSD or Windows, needs to have additionaly software: Mono,
e) Releasing your software (even internal) under different languages will undoubtable lead to an enourmous increase in support questions.
Why does my Python call give that silly error message? Because the user gave a wrong argument (type)
The more complex your system becomes, like a lot here on
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.