I spent my sandbox time this weekend bouncing between JavaFX and various java spring topics.

I have pretty much concluded that JavaFX isn’t somewhere I want to spend sandbox time. It appears to be less capable and productive than WPF for local UI work and Angular on Spring appear more broadly useful in the environments where Java reigns supreme.

I started out looking at framing up a light version of the a file de-duplication tool (yeah a theme that keeps coming up at the moment) in JavaFX. As I dug deeper in, the facilities looked less and less productive compared to the tools I’ve been using in WPF.

I switched over to spring and spring boot. This is less familiar territory (I’ve coded java in spring environments but always in an existing architecture) so the balance of the weekend was heavy on reading and google searches and lighter on code creation.

I’m also looking at service wrapper tools for java as local java tools with Angular UI front ends really want to live as services…running a tool and then separately connecting to it with a browser always strikes me as awkward…

I’m not sure how deeply I’ll run down this route. I’ll probably put together a local use tool (scrub a folder tree and allow selective dedup) this way before I’m done. For the moment, I’m inclined to lean towards C# and .NET for most of my work  (I love C++ but C# lets me get more done in less time…with C++/CLI as an avenue to native code when necessary).