Question for you desktop guys. I was thinking of making a desktop app with a GUI as a side project. It's mostly going to be business-like CRUD, no fancy stuff. I was thinking of using electron (since I'm a web developer) but I read that it's slow and bloated. On the other hand I would like learning something new. I don't want to spend too much time on the GUI so I would prefer a framework/language that already has some nice open source gui packs available. I have only ever used JavaFX before for a tutorial, is that a good choice? Also, I would like it to work on both linux and windows.

slow and bloated? ah, so that's why vscode and atom are so popular. because they are built on top of something slow. and bloated. I guess we should those all go back to writing everything in c.

in all seriousness, you can create some real nice stuff in JavaFX.

@balte Thanks, I was skeptical of that too. And I was thinking that electron is pretty new, so even if it's a bit slow compared to native apps now, it will be improved in the future.

I’ve experimented with electron and I’ll admit it’s freaking awesome how quick it is to turn into a working desktop app. Just don’t look into the endless modules folder and you’ll be alright.

As @balte said, vs code and atom are built on top of electron, I also use Insomnia (a rest client alternative to postman) and it’s solid as gold.

@C0D4 I was thinking of using electron as an opportunity to learn react/angular/vue. Maybe I'll whip up some prototypes both with java and electron and compare them.

Electron is awesome imo!

python has also some gui libs... if you are interested in python ;)

@Bitwise Yep, I really liked the netbeans wysiwig. C++ is a bit overkill for what I'm thinking.

@GodHatesMe I want to support linux too🙂

@sssssss13 I like python but after some quick research the gui libraries looked old fashioned.

I do desktop and embedded. I recommend C# or another .net language. It's just easy, as long as you are fine with learning c#. It's got amazing packages and great libraries you'll probably like it.

Electron is cool too. I use great apps in electron. However IMHO it's a hack the web guys like. It's a (relative) waste of resources compared to a native app.

I love c & c++ alot (my profession is embedded devices) but do yourself a favor and don't do GUI in it. The libraries though powerful are old and clunky. Alternatively you write your own GUI toolkit but I can tell you from experience that takes alot of time and is trickier than expected.

That's my thoughts