These days everybody wants to write web applications, cuz we all know that the web has all the cool technologies: Angular, React, Vue, you name it. More than that we can actually see JavaScript being pushed everywhere including mobile and desktop. Java, C++, native applications are all obsolete! Ionic and Electron are the future.

Well, this is rubbish! I played with most of the modern web technologies and they are OK, but calling Java obsolete and telling that Electron is better for cross platform desktop development, because it’s based on “modern JavaScript”, it’s just crazy.

For the last year I worked on web and mobile applications and I enjoyed the experience, but I think that software development using most of the current web frameworks is very similar to cooking using frozen prefabricated food. Yea, it’s quicker and easier, but most of the time, the taste just isn’t there. I think that more and more developers are blinded by the all shining web frameworks that will be obsolete in two or three months. Everything that isn’t web is considered crap and every developer that works on a desktop application using a good old language/toolkit is considered sadly stuck into the middle ages of programming. This is bullshit!!! It’s like saying that Ramsay Gordon is obsolete and the dude who serves hot-dogs is the real deal. This is not a rant against web development in general, I’m the first to recognize that I enjoy a good burger and some fast food can be very tasty and healthy but don’t compare it with the main dish served by a chef. I don’t know what happened to this world, but it’s sad that, these days, writing C++ or Java code for the desktop is considered inferior, uncool, not modern, but writing some unmanageable mess using an ever changing JavaScript framework is considered the pinnacle of programming. No sir! Native still matters, desktop applications are still relevant and the developers writing them are the finest programmers ever.

Sometimes, I miss the days when I wrote Java Swing code. For cross platform desktop development, I think Java is still one of the best choices and looking at Java 9, Swing is definitely not obsolete: it was updated with features for high resolution screens, it’s the toolkit used by IntelliJ/Android Studio, it’s still a beast.