Clojure Lisp and a modern GUI

http://briancarper.net/2008/10/31/qt4-in-lisp/

by lst • 18 years ago

46 18 18 years ago

watmough• 18 years ago

What's wrong with using Swing?

I had some experience with using Swing and Clojure, and was able to easily wire up GUIs laid out in NetBeans to Clojure code.

This included subclassing elements such as table view headers to customize appearance, cross-platform on OS X and XP.

Note also that Clojure can be hinted to eliminate type reflection, bringing performance to a par with Java.

jamesbritt• 18 years ago

"What's wrong with using Swing?"

I make an argument for Swing as the best Ruby GUI option here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-monkeybars/index...

I imagine something akin to Monkeybars could be developed for Clojure whereby developers can exploit the fluidity of the language while getting the benefit of Swing development tools.

lst• 18 years ago

What's wrong with using Swing?

It's interesting that Qt places itself as "a better Java". Regarding the UI and API parts, many coders knowing both Java and Qt seem to agree.

michaelneale4• 18 years ago

They both suck from a users point of view. Who cares what developers think - if you want your users to have the best experience, then as a developer you have to not think of your own convenience.

cliff• 18 years ago

What's up with you people who design UI programmatically?

This is 2008, jesus christ.

http://code.google.com/android/devel/ui/xml.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Application_Markup_L...

omouse• 18 years ago

In Lisp, code is data and data is code ;P so he's designing it in a markup language that happens to be Clojure :D

tomjen• 18 years ago

Almost nobody mixes lisp (or derivatives of lisp) and XML - sexpressions are the typical representation of lisp code and are isomorphic to xml.

epall• 18 years ago

As soon as I can find a well-tested, mature framework for this that has an awesome GUI designer, I'll switch! Until then Swing Designer is my friend.

michaelneale4• 18 years ago

Markup only solves the shallow part of the problem anyway. Sure it can help communicate with graphic designers, but it doesn't do everything.

Lots of OSX apps (the ones which most people think of as being friendly, usable and pretty) are done mostly programmatically, even with the interface builder stuff available...

corentin• 18 years ago

You didn't explain why it's a good thing.

From what I understand, it only complicates development even more without providing any real improvement.

etal• 18 years ago

It can be a good thing the way HTML-CSS-Javascript separation can be a good thing. In the case of Clojure, it actually is possible to write the layout code in a declarative style and keep the handlers completely separate, but for most of the popular languages, it's easier to just use Qt Designer, Glade or similar to generate an XML layout and write the handlers in your language of choice. Compared to the old approach of GUI designers generating a pile of C/C++ code, which you then modify, the XML blob is actually much nicer.

Also, most of the XML-presentation libraries offer multiple language bindings, so there's less of a requirement for your language to provide its own GUI toolkit, and it's easier to convert your app from one language to another (e.g. injecting Python into a legacy C app) without losing any of the details from the original interface.

lhorn• 18 years ago

UI on JVM suggestion? Again?

There are very good reasons why this combination hasn't been particularly popular. C++ with a few libs like MFC or WTL continues to rule on Windows being slowly replaced by .NET stack, Obj-C keeps rocking on OSX and C/C++ with Qt/GTK doing their job on Linux/BSD. Why is that? I suspect because of 3 reasons: very weak JVM penetration on the desktop, JVM is too heavy for most applications and because JDK-based UI feels foreign on every platform.

Developing a desktop application on JDK means that your users will have to deal with 100MB+ downloads followed by quirky installation process that rewards the with less then stellar UI experience at the end, especially the slow startup time.

Startup time is more important than most developers think: majority of desktop apps absolutely need it: imagine 5-second delay every time you wanted to launch Apple's "Quick View" to glance at a file, or imagine 5+ JVM-based apps load&initialize after reboot. Most desktop software I worked on was small-to-medium size and we just couldn't afford to add those 5+ seconds on JVM initialization. JVM I guess will work OK for projects like Ecilpse or a big Office suite or something like Photoshop. Microsoft understands this very well, this is why C#/.NET is so carefully optimized around loading time and comes with precompilation tools that essentially turn your C# code (including .NET itself) into native Win32 modules.

One project I want to do for myself is a usable Del.icio.us client for OSX. I can't see how I can use JVM-based tools for that... I want instant start-up by a hotkey when I need to search for links or add one. Moreover, I want users to be able to download and try it under 20 seconds.

The only JDKUI apps I'v ever used were development tools for Java itself plus numerous crap for the enterprise. And, of course, every once in a while I get "Java. Please wait..." splash screen on a new cellphone, followed by a prompt "Cancel/Go Back" keypress: that pretty much sums up my JVM-based UI experience. Which is sad: Clojure is going to be locked up on the server just like Java has been for years.

michaelneale4• 18 years ago

>Windows being slowly replaced by .NET stack

Veryyy slowly... but I think its the same issue with it.

>100MB+ downloads

When is that ever the case? Certainly not the VM or even a "odd" toolkit like SWT.

>Startup time is more important than most developers think

Agree. Any app its more important them people think.

The bottom line is if you want maximum responsiveness, minimum size, you have to eliminate layers, not add them. And Obj-C + cocoa is a fairly productive environment. however, it isn't necessarily small or fast to startup - have you downloaded or tried to create a cocoa app lately? 30 + meg is common for the most basic things. And they are anything but instant to start up. Sounds like you want quicksilver like performance - which means pre loading - or just use quicksilver (probably already is a del.icio.us thing in existence).

delackner• 18 years ago

Getting pretty off topic here, but "30+ meg... for the most basic things" is a totally unrealistic assessment of cocoa.

Sizes, INSTALLED, not from the compressed DMG:

An entire quicken-like 100% cocoa app: 6 megabytes,

Seashore, a streamlined graphics editor based on the gimp: 8.4mb

And for a "truly small" example, the "wakeup your computer and play an itunes song" alarm clock I first wrote to learn Cocoa years ago: 500k.

jwilliams• 18 years ago

Java has always had challenges ont he desktop, but I don't agree with a lot of your assertions.

> ..users will have to deal with 100MB+ downloads

I've never seen a JRE download that big. At most it's around 25Mb, although in practice you can get it a lot smaller than that (sub 10Mb for the minimal install afaik).

> ..One project I want to do for myself is a usable Del.icio.us client for OSX.

Java is already shipped on every copy of OS X - so zero download in that case. The startup time seems just fine. I'm using Apache JMeter right now and the startup time seems about the same as any other app I use.

Zak• 18 years ago

You're arguing that people should use Qt or GTK on *nix. The article is about using Qt with Clojure. Qt also looks and works well enough on Windows - at least, I never hear any complaints about Opera related to its UI toolkit.

The startup time can be a problem, and Clojure offering only JIT compilation doesn't improve things.

Clojure Lisp and a modern GUI

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