Performance Evaluation of Graphical User Interfaces in Java and C#

Abstract

With the growing usage and migration of interactive applications and systems into today’s environment, the significance of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) increases as they act as the gates into using systems efficiently. Therefore, extensive efforts are spent to enhance the usability of the GUIs. However, most of the works focus on testing the functional properties of applications’ GUIs rather than nonfunctional features such as performance. For this reason, it is worthwhile to assess the performance of various GUI components at runtime. In this paper, the most popular programming languages used to create GUI based applications namely, Java and C# were compared experimentally to evaluate their performance in terms of the creation and manipulation of GUI components/controls. The experimental results of this study, which is based on 32 testing scenarios, showed that Java outperformed C# in all test scenarios. This might be because of the “HotSpot” performance engine that Java uses. This study is useful for developers to get insights into the performance of different GUI components provided by different programming languages. Also, it helps them to choose the right programming language for their GUI based applications hence enhance the overall applications’ performance and user satisfaction.