I’m the head tech and programmer at my company. Ain’t that impressive, it’s not a huge company and the only employee I had was a part timer, and he quit to go back to school. I find myself creating a large number of two-button doohickeys so our other employees don’t have to click the same button eight thousand times. (That is a real number, and there are worse cases.)
Some of our people use Macs because they either need to or want to. I don’t care and think that people should use what they’re most comfortable with. For these one-offs, I am highly interested in making sure about the “quick” in “quick-n-dirty,” because given that a lot of our work is technical and I’m also a data analyst, working fast is a must. (My job is hard blah blah blah poor me, but efficiency is still key.)
As is known, coding UIs in Swing using Eclipse is a pain in the ass. Currently to get around this, since all our Mac users have MS Office installed just for convenience, what I’ve been doing is creating .xlsm files with auto-launching WinForms that use VBA to do whatever. This works fine and no one is complaining.
Still, it looks doofy to me (“To parse the thousand text files and run them through machine translation, the tech guy gave me this Excel file!”), and I also don’t trust MS to keep their stuff working on Mac OS. Java’s the gold standard for cross-platform for a reason, but the two most-recommended GUI creators – NetBeans and WindowBuilder – still have way more overhead to them than just pooping out a VBA form. I’m wondering if anyone’s built a better mousetrap, even if it’s heresy.
I’d use Lazarus and Free Pascal - a mature product, fully cross-platform, with a philosophy of ‘write once, compile and run anywhere’.
Powerful cross-platform IDE, quick to develop with, and the same code can be compiled and run without modification on PC, Mac, or Linux. Extremely fast, since it’s compiled.
Easy to create any kind of GUI, and easily powerful and flexible enough for anything you want to do.
But unless you know it, the learning curve may be too high for casual, one-off applications.
Cool! I’ll check it out. I frickin’ love expanding my powers. Thought about including that I’m open to other ideas, but I didn’t want to make the OP too long. Thank you!
Is there a reason you don’t want to make this a web app that runs in the browser? Having to download and install executables is not just a security risk, but also a huge future maintenance/update hassle (oh, you’re on the wrong version / the firewall settings are wrong / you don’t have admin permissions).
With a web app, you can serve it only via the intranet and the files to be processed never even have to leave people’s computers. Javascript can do a lot these days, and there are a bazillion and one frameworks to choose from.
It would make your users’ lives infinitely easier than having to deal with desktop apps.
I make my students crank out a basic UI using Netbeans in Swing, and then as further punishment, I make them do it again for JavaFX, though this requires a third party program. It’s an exercise they’re meant to do in less than two hours. (Most of the course has them doing this by hand, mind you.)
If it’s just a two-button application and you’re just interested in quick and dirty with no regard for style, it really couldn’t be easier and it’s about twenty lines of code for the UI. You’d need to change the button labels and provide your own controller. Heck, fire me a PM and I’ll send you something today after lectures.
The last step required would be to make it into a jar file. For this little thing, it would be a casual quick jaunt through the command line to get it done, no SDK required for any of it.
