The future of NetBeans UI

[hantsy]

NetBeans UI is heavily dependent on Swing, which has almost stopped adding new features. And in the future, it could be removed from the standard JDK redistribution.

Is it possible to use today's AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) to migrate the NetBeans IDE to use JavaFX for the UI, modernize the codebase to embrace new Java features(functional programming, records, virtual thread, etc.), and use Jakarta Inject to replace the Lookup system, etc.?

These days, I've found that BlueJ 6 has already fully switched to JavaFX.

[Chris2011]

I would prefer to switch completely to a webbased solution with HTML and CSS but this is just my opinion. I thought that JavaFX is kind of dead.

[hantsy]

Oh, it is VS Code.

And NetBeans and Oracle all have their own Java extensions for it.

[hantsy]

And the NodeJS/web pages based editor requires a heavy container/appshell to package.

[williamgates108]

@hantsy, please don't even go there. It would be an insane amount of work that would bring more value to JavaFX than to NetBeans

Point 1. NetBeans is one of the largest code bases in the world (like 5M lines of code), rough guess, 40-60% of it is Swing code. Working perfectly fine without latency issues of any sort and swing least "unstable/buggy" ui framework in java

Point 2. IntelliJ and JDeveloper also use swing and they have "big dollar backing", eclipse uses SWT (which is not included in the JDK and roughly as old as swing with only IBM really doing something for it).

Point 3. Why would a bunch of open source volunteers do all this when "big tech" can't even consider it.

Point 4. JavaFX is bound to a given JDK version so if you wanted to run NetBeans using the latest JavaFX you would pretty much have to make NetBeans compatible with the latest JDK only (right now you can run it with anything between 21 and 26-27)

Point 5. When you have a constantly moving tech stack: Java SE, Jakarta versions, JavaFX, a little bit of "ground" on the development tools (i.e. the IDEs, JVisualVM, Profilers, Debugers, etc) is not going to neither kill you nor make it worse for your customers. After all, you can use a swing IDE to develop JavaFX applications.

Please stop this. It's too painful to even think about it.

JavaFX not dead @Chris2011 ACtually, it's getting a bit of momentum with hyperscalers wanting to do super cool "dashboards" to monitor LLM training.