Quote:
Originally Posted by Arhowk
I did know that but ugh, javafx? nasty.
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Firstly, I agree with your "ugh,nasty" for JavaFX *the language* from JavaFX *the toolkit* 1.x. However, JavaFX *the toolkit* 2.x is a toolkit that you can program in any JVM language, and is much better which is what 2014 SmartDashboard uses. Very handy.
Re the original question, I would have to agree with you for the current 2013 SmartDashboard. When SmartDashboard originally came out, I was the creator of the ZomB Dashboard System (search around for details about that) and saw absoloutely nothing interesting in it aside from the fact that it could run on Mac + Linux whereas ZomB was C#+WPF and windows restricted. If you wanted a totally AWESOME dashboard before 2012, ZomB was it. I was then a senior, and got accepted to WPI (Woo!), and am bringing my experiences from ZomB to SmartDashboard, so expect more awesome soon...
Side rant and strong opinions about GUI toolkits:
I originally wrote ZomB in WinForms, then picked up a book about WPF and was totally blown away, so re-wrote the UI side of ZomB in WPF. To this day, I feel as if WPF is the best engineered UI toolkit i've seen. I left Windows shortly after graduating high school so looked at Java stuff a bit. Swing felt like a worse WinForms and had many things that I felt were odd, in addition to its horrible ugly default look. Then I saw JavaFX and although it seems like a "quick! do WPF! but in java!" sort of thing and 2.x is missing some interesting things, it does have many of the good things I saw in WPF.
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