Filthy rich clients
by Chet Haase, Romain Guy · first published 2007
41mentions
3recommended by
6HN commenters
2008–2025first – last mentioned
43% recommend43% neutral14% critical
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Have you checked out Chet Haase & Romain Guy's Filthy Rich Clients in Java? Pretty slick in my opinion as far as Java UIs go. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=155276) It is worth noting that Chet has since moved to work for Adobe, and Romain now works at Google…
on “Why developers prefer Macs” ↗> Java: UI looks terrible Java GUIs can be made to look quite nice, just many developers never spend the time to go beyond the default settings. If anything, the old Filthy Rich Clients blog from Chet Haase , Romain Guy was full of examples how to achieve great UIs in Java. However most 9to5ers don't read such sources of information.
on “Three months of Rust” ↗Yes it is using it wrong, because while some issues are indeed Swing interop bugs with the host GUI, others are lack of skills by not reading canonical books like "Filthy Rich Clients", written by Chet Haase and Romain Guy, the guys that drove most of Android rendering stack. Romain Guy's team recently released Filament, https://github.com/google/filament Back in the Sun days, Romain…
on “Java 11 released” ↗No they aren't, provided that the developers actually bother to read books like "Filthy Rich Clients". https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applic...
on “The decline and fall of Java on the desktop” ↗> Swing gets the job done, nothing more. Which is what matters when delivering business value to fulfil customer's needs, not to be something cool to write blog posts on HN. Also a few days reading "Filthy Rich Clients" would make wonders to some Swing developers that actually care about UI/UX.
on “NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract” ↗Because most developers don't bother to read Sun tutorials and books like "Filthy Rich Clients".
on “Show HN: Hacker News desktop application in Kotlin/Swing” ↗If you want to know learn how to implement not-so-out-of-the-box GUI elements, I will suggest a book called Swing Hacks. If you want advanced controls, plus some nice animations, try Filthy Rich Clients. Both books are for the Java Swing library.
on “Ask HN: Book recommendations for GUI development” ↗Anyone that bothered to read "Filthy Rich Clients" or followed the respective Sun blog, knows how to take advantage of Swing APIs and make it a Good Thing. Not to mention that I rather do Swing than web development, if given the option.
on “Google’s Flutter = React and Java Swing” ↗…in any GUI toolkit, one needs to have the taste and knowledge how to make into reality the wishes of a designer, or be a designer themselves. On Swing's case taking the effort of reading books like "Filthy Rich Clients" and "Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs". http://filthyrichclients.org/ https://joshondesign.com/c/writings And be aware of cool 3rd party components like http://www.jgoodies.com/ The biggest…
on “A Preview of C# 8 [video]” ↗…against all tracing GC languages used to research the mentioned paper. Yes, many JVM based UIs do suck, mostly because the authors didn't bother to learn how to use Swing properly by reading books like Filthy Rich Clients. The thing with Swift UIs, is that they are actually C and C++ UIs, given that those are the languages used to implement Core Graphics, Core Animation and Metal. Additionally Cocoa is still mostly Objective-C,…
on “Swift Generics Evolution” ↗Swing is only bad for those that never bothered how to use it properly, by reading blogs and books like Filthy Rich Clients.
on “Not So Fast: Analyzing the Performance of WebAssembly vs. Native Code” ↗Swing is only an horror show for those that don't bother to read books like "Filthy Rich Clients", or don't want to spend money on a proper design team. Why do I mention? Because until now .NET Core still doesn't have anything like Swing across all supported platforms. MAUI might do it (Xamarin…
on “C++20 has been approved” ↗Plus there are frameworks like JGoodies and everyone should look at Filthy Rich Clients book. The biggest issue with Swing is just bad defaults. Except for NeWS, Sun wasn't really into the desktop business.
on “Are we GUI Yet? The state of building user interfaces in Rust” ↗> Even the end result UI design look & feel is butt ugly. Only when developed by those devs that never bothered to read books like "Filthy Rich Clients".
on “VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering” ↗Spending a few minutes a day reading "Filthy Rich Clients" would already help. Sun is the one to blame, as traditional UNIX company their Swing team just didn't had any clue about the desktop world, outside enterprise walls. Oracle is actually doing much more…
on “Where will UX Design be in 5 years?” ↗