atlantafx

I think it's good to be aware that there is a lot of bad tutorials/libraries for JavaFX out there. Also many StackOverflow answers are quite outdated as the popularity hit a peak like a decade ago. Also don't use FXML (the weird declarative way of creating GUIs). I think the best way to get started would be to download the sampler application from https://github.com/mkpaz/atlantafx. That is state of the art, good implementation. You can play around with it and jump to the source code to see how it is implemented. It contains almost everything an application needs. Also depending how old your general Java knowledge is, the modern way of creating applications is through the module system and the jlink/jpackage tools. There are many outdated solutions for application packaging out there as well. If anything you see is using the classpath, bu

JVM UI isn't so bad. I've written some pretty modern looking UI with it. The sophisticated controls are all there. Modern JavaFX theme: https://github.com/mkpaz/atlantafx Modern Swing theme: https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf And these days Compose Multiplatform: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/ I tend to use Kotlin rather than Java but of course Java is perfectly fine too. You can also use Clojure. If you use any of those frameworks you can distribute to Win/Mac/Linux in one command with Conveyor. It's free for open source apps and can do self-signing for Windows if you don't want to pay for the certificates or the Store (but the Store is super cheap these days, $19 one off payment for an individual). Also supports Electron and Flutter if you want to use those. From those frameworks you can then access whatever p

Objectively by what measure? Bear in mind that there are alternatives: JavaFX and Compose for Desktop are the ones I know best. They can be used from high level and popular languages. JavaFX is particularly good for desktop apps and can be compiled down to purely native code that starts as fast as an app written in C++ (likewise for Compose but the experiments with that are newer). There are some downsides: fewer people know them than with HTML. There are a few tweaks like window styles on macOS it could use to be more modern. On the other hand, it's easy to learn and you benefit from a proper reactively bindable widget library, like table and tree views if you need those. For developer tools such widgets can be useful. There's a modern theme for JavaFX here: https://github.com/mkpaz/atlantafx CfD uses Material Design of course, but you c