Need Java recommendation

chvid · Oct 20, 2009

Nitro.

The answer is Swing.

For what you are doing Java and Swing is the best choice. Used right JTable does not have any performance issues; glazedlist is something you can look into if you want a more advanced table ui.

For an example of a nice fast crossplatform Swing application:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/free_java_ide.html

Which incidentally also is the best Java IDE around.

nitro · Oct 20, 2009

Thanks for all the replies. I will look for Swing tutorials online.

nitro · Oct 20, 2009

I have seen Jetbrains and before it, I thought there weren't any good IDEs for Java. I am not a fan of Eclipse.

Quote from chvid:

...
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/free_java_ide.html

Which incidentally also is the best Java IDE around.

chvid · Oct 21, 2009

No. IntelliJ is a very good IDE. Industry leading in many areas.

And if you use an open source tool chain - say apache ant (or maven) for building and subversion for version control - then this free edition completely covers what you need.

dcraig · Oct 21, 2009

Quote from NetTecture:

NONE of the standard components will be at enough. THis is not a Swing issue - it is an issue more in the line of common sense.

Basically, trading applications are very specific in their requirements and demands. Generic components will never be fast enough, unless they are perfectly optimized for that.

A generic grid in general will pretty much blow

As I pointed out above, it's not the table or the grid, it's the cell renderer(s) that need to be optimized if the default one isn't quick enough. They are where all the work is done.

Though on a modern machine with a decent graphics card, out of the box may well work fast enough and it makes no sense doing anything else until some prototype benchmarks have been done.

In any case, is there any point in updating table cells a hundred times a second? Nobody can read that quickly. Some sort of throttling in line with system requirements may be the most sensible optimization at the end of the day.

dcraig · Oct 21, 2009

Here is a somewhat old but do doubt still relevant article on optimizing JTable performance for "real time" apps:

http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/ChristmasTree/

dcraig · Oct 21, 2009

One other reminder for anybody new to Swing. Anything that causes Swing components to be (re)painted should be done from the AWT event thread. You may or may not have problems if you don't observe this discipline.

See SwingUtilities.InvokeLater () or SwingUtilities.InvokeAndWait ()

foible · Oct 23, 2009

Quote from Rocko Bonaparte:

My big gripe with Java GUI work is that without something approximate function pointers, you find yourself having to create anonymous classes, with all the extra scaffolding, in order to feed a lot of the event-driven messaging that GUIs tend to use. It's a little bit messy for a language that was trying to clean things up.

Check out Groovy and its SwingBuilder. You can cut the code of your GUIs down by 75% or more and supply the proper function pointers (better: closures!) and other dynamic deliciousness. Scala is also much better at GUIs that Java and also interoperates well.