This is a great writeup and good to see I'm not the only one looking at JVM for cross platform desktop apps.
Recently I've been experimenting with TornadoFX and it is very nice to work with. It's a Kotlin wrapper for JavaFX providing a "declarative builder DSL" to compose views. It uses a MVVM approach where the View components are bound to the ViewModel using observables. JavaFX supports CSS for styling components including variables without the clunky web css variable syntax. And with Kotlin coroutines/suspend functions it's trivial to add async IO for network and disk access.
Combine all that with modern JVM and Gradle tooling for native packaging (deb/rpm/msi/dmg) and access to the huge ecosystem of JVM libraries.
Of course there are drawbacks. JVM startup time isn't great but even with Spring Dependency Injection my project starts up in under a second which is fine for a long-running desktop app imho. It will never be as fast or consume as little memory as a native toolkit does but to me it's the pragmatic sweet spot in between native toolkits and packaging a full webbrowser like Electron.
I'm not affiliated with TornadoFX or JavaFX, just a happy user that has rediscovered joy in building desktop apps again.
Recently I've been experimenting with TornadoFX and it is very nice to work with. It's a Kotlin wrapper for JavaFX providing a "declarative builder DSL" to compose views. It uses a MVVM approach where the View components are bound to the ViewModel using observables. JavaFX supports CSS for styling components including variables without the clunky web css variable syntax. And with Kotlin coroutines/suspend functions it's trivial to add async IO for network and disk access.
Combine all that with modern JVM and Gradle tooling for native packaging (deb/rpm/msi/dmg) and access to the huge ecosystem of JVM libraries.
Of course there are drawbacks. JVM startup time isn't great but even with Spring Dependency Injection my project starts up in under a second which is fine for a long-running desktop app imho. It will never be as fast or consume as little memory as a native toolkit does but to me it's the pragmatic sweet spot in between native toolkits and packaging a full webbrowser like Electron.
I'm not affiliated with TornadoFX or JavaFX, just a happy user that has rediscovered joy in building desktop apps again.