Comparative Studies of 10 Programming Languages within 10 Diverse Criteria -- a Team 7 COMP6411-S10 Term Report

Window Toolkit (AWT) was the first Java’s technology/component set for building graphical user interfaces (GUI). AWT UIs were very slow to run with limited functionalities due to the small number of provided components. Just-in-time compilers (JIT) were introduced in order to improve applications’ execution and performance and Java Foundation Classes (JFC) technology was released also to improve productivity and to provide a new rich set of components. JFC provides a group of features and graphic functionalities that can be mixed together for building powerful and extendable desktop applications. Among these features are internationalization which enables to build applications that support different languages and cultural conventions, pluggable look-and-feel which allows to choose a look among wide choices of look and feel and themes on different platform/operating systems (GTK+, Motif, Windows, Macintosh) and many more. As part of JFC, Java Swing is an API which provides a set of GUI components such as buttons, tables, text box and features for printing, drag and drop, customizing components layout and many more [67]. AspectJ-based Swing enables developers to build either document interface (MDI) using the JdesktopPane container and JinternalFrames or single document interface (SDI) GUIs. The NetBeans IDE provides a user interface designer (UID) allowing developers to design/prototype GUIs. Also, there are some plug-in for the Eclipse IDE which can be used to design interfaces with Swing. On the other hand, the .NET Framework was first released with the Windows Forms (WinForms) API as a part of it. WinForms is not flexible enough and is said platform-dependent since it is built upon the Windows API (the famous WinAPI or Win32 API) which resulted in a bad design and it doesn’t support the model-view-controller architecture. To resolve this problem and push further the UI development, Microsoft has introduced the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) a new revolutionary technology for building platform-independent GUIs, [68]. WPF provides much better functionalities than Swing including animations, data templates, effects, templates and many more. Also, WPF is based on the XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) which is a new declarative language where developers can either manually or using the UI designer describe/declare the properties of the UI’s controls and components without the use of the traditional imperative programming [68]. The main goal of XAML is to isolate the graphical content from the code which resulted in a cleaner and better understandable and maintainable code. WinForms and WPF are not part of .NET’s Base Class Library (BCL) which means they are not standardized as of the ECMA/ISO standards. To build applications using the WinForms the System.Windows.Forms.dll library should be used and referenced, same for WPF where the System.Windows.dll is required. AspectJ-based Swing is built-in Java and no libraries/references are needed to do so (it can be directly imported using the import keyword i.e import javax.swing.*)[68]. Visual Studio C# comes with a user interface designer (UID) and Toolbox which enable users to add control/components such as buttons, text box, menus, toolbars and so on to the design interface and set their properties and their events handlers. Swing, WinForms and WPF are popular and used in different development projects, but nowadays, Microsoft’s technologies are more popular and suitable to build desktop applications. WinForms or WPF have a high interoperability with the MS SQL Server database system. C# has a lot of advantages over AspectJ-based Swing for prototyping UIs, a WPF code can be simply embedded in a web ASP.NET application without any configuration since WPF can be executed in any browser [69]. There are some discussions and rumors over the web that AspectJ/Java Swing is dead and it is no longer used in development projects: before Java 1.5, Java Swing left a bad perception behind.