I thought I'd check out the current state-of-play with regards to developing Java GUI application under Ubuntu:
Netbeans 7.0.1: I used the New Project wizard to start with and was told that the Swing Application Framework was no longer being developed and that I should try the Netbeans platform. So, OK, I will give that a go and sure enough I got a blank GUI application running. Then I thought, where's the JAR for this? Seems that there is not just one but a few and no obvious way to package them together. Plus, what was actually generated would be over-kill for many GUI applications.
So I thought, let's try the Swing option and ignore the warning. So I get a Swing application generated and it compiles, but it does not run. Seems that various parts of the GUI are never instantiated and so there's a lot of null pointer exceptions about.
Eclipse Indigo: I generate a blank Java application, but it's so blank there's not actually any Java generated. Plus: no sign of any tool to help create a GUI application and nothing in the repos to help do this.
This is disappointing. Netbeans used to work fairly well in this regard, but it looks like things have moved on, and perhaps my understanding of how things are done in Java/Netbeans needs to move on. As for what was up with Eclipse, I do not know - but I've never really cared for that IDE anyway.
This all compares badly with the likes of QT and MonoDevelop, where I can get a basic GUI application running very quickly.
Am I doing something wrong here?
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