I realize that NeXT is officially dead. I've been to the wake, I shed my tears, I moved on. However, I believe that a discussion about elegance of GUI frameworks MUST at least mention NEXTSTEP.
The framework was OO from top to bottom. All of the components in the framework were extensible by the developer, and the documentation didn't suck! Display Postscript allowed for some amazing flexibility (as long as you speak RPN:^), and it made the acronym WYSIWYG true because the screen was rendered with the same engine as hard copy.
Swing is very good, I've been using it for a few months now, but the UI's created with it are dumb'ed down. The Swing framework is designed to make it easy to create a UI programatically. Bravo, it is very good at that, but the results look like shit. NeXT's 10 year old (yes, proprietary) GUI builder, InterfaceBuilder.app, is still better than any of the other products out there. I've used JBuidler and VisualCafe, and I've glanced at VisualAge, and none of those GUI builders stack up to what NeXT offered.
If you are looking for a good framework, check out what NeXT did over the last decade. It may be dead, but that doesn't mean it wasn't good.
- Dave
-- David Goodman Citadel Investment Group, LLC david_goodman@iname.com
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I realize that NeXT is officially dead. I've been to the wake, I shed my tears, I moved on. However, I believe that a discussion about elegance of GUI frameworks MUST at least mention NEXTSTEP.
:^), and it made the acronym WYSIWYG true because the screen was rendered with the same engine as hard copy.
The framework was OO from top to bottom. All of the components in the framework were extensible by the developer, and the documentation didn't suck! Display Postscript allowed for some amazing flexibility (as long as you speak RPN
Swing is very good, I've been using it for a few months now, but the UI's created with it are dumb'ed down. The Swing framework is designed to make it easy to create a UI programatically. Bravo, it is very good at that, but the results look like shit. NeXT's 10 year old (yes, proprietary) GUI builder, InterfaceBuilder.app, is still better than any of the other products out there. I've used JBuidler and VisualCafe, and I've glanced at VisualAge, and none of those GUI builders stack up to what NeXT offered.
If you are looking for a good framework, check out what NeXT did over the last decade. It may be dead, but that doesn't mean it wasn't good.
- Dave
--
David Goodman
Citadel Investment Group, LLC
david_goodman@iname.com