Tcl/Tk would've saved you. Would've taken you a few minutes. We built all kinds of touchscreen hardware for factories, entertainment, PoS etc with Tcl/Tk, Perl and C in those days. It was lovely, without the rose coloured glasses; it is still rock solid and fast, just no-one accepts that type of UI anymore. Many of these still run without updates for decades.
We developed with Turbo Pascal in the second half of 80s for 50+ b2b applications which later were ported to Delphi and grew to 100+ b2b applications. It was excellent. Many of them still run, updated and recompiled with Lazarus.
When Java and the web came (for me they started at the same time; I went ‘simple 90s server side cgi’ web years later unfortunately; I think explained by our clients not wanting anything web at first, at all), things went a bit crappy imho. I made good money out of Java by starting a company immediately when the beta was released, but resource hogging on client and server and sluggishness became normal then, at around the same time that, first because of Applets I think, people started to want non-standard UIs.
> Sometimes they're slow or a little buggy but the trade off is worth it.
Exactly that. You want the features, so you take the slow and buggy with it. I refuse (mostly because the 1995-2005 java ptsd period I had), which means I have to write many things myself but at least it's fast and does what I want; when there are bugs, I fix them.
Tcl/Tk would've saved you. Would've taken you a few minutes. We built all kinds of touchscreen hardware for factories, entertainment, PoS etc with Tcl/Tk, Perl and C in those days. It was lovely, without the rose coloured glasses; it is still rock solid and fast, just no-one accepts that type of UI anymore. Many of these still run without updates for decades.
We developed with Turbo Pascal in the second half of 80s for 50+ b2b applications which later were ported to Delphi and grew to 100+ b2b applications. It was excellent. Many of them still run, updated and recompiled with Lazarus.
When Java and the web came (for me they started at the same time; I went ‘simple 90s server side cgi’ web years later unfortunately; I think explained by our clients not wanting anything web at first, at all), things went a bit crappy imho. I made good money out of Java by starting a company immediately when the beta was released, but resource hogging on client and server and sluggishness became normal then, at around the same time that, first because of Applets I think, people started to want non-standard UIs.
> Sometimes they're slow or a little buggy but the trade off is worth it.
Exactly that. You want the features, so you take the slow and buggy with it. I refuse (mostly because the 1995-2005 java ptsd period I had), which means I have to write many things myself but at least it's fast and does what I want; when there are bugs, I fix them.