Java – Dev Platform of choice for Windows and OS X desktop apps

airdesktop applicationjavarealbasic

I'm about to write a small desktop app that should run on Windows and Mac OS X mainly. The choices I have so far are:

  • I usually use Java + Swing for this type of stuff, but this app should be really tiny (about 1Mb) and I don't want to embed the ~26mb JRE on the Windows version or ask users to have it installed.
  • I have good experience with Flex and AIR and users of this app will eventually use the Flash player (the app will output swf files most of the time). But performance is important (kinda), and I would like to write an app that have native look-and-feel.
  • I've been also considering realBasic. It seems promising and easy to get started with. But, I really do not want to write basic. It's been a very long time since I wrote basic programs (about 10 years). Plus, I can't find many supporters of it.

I don't have any working experience in C/C++. And this is a very small project that I would like to finish in about a month. Any suggestions?

Best Answer

REALbasic can be a great way to create cross-platform apps. The language is fully object-oriented and resembles Java far more than it does any version of BASIC that you may have used.

REALbasic does compile to native apps with a native look-and-feel, but the executables are not small. Even an empty app will be more than 1MB.

However, given your app will output Flash files, it seems like Flex/AIR might make the most sense for this project.

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