Re: Create Graphical interface

[Tamas Perlaky <tamas@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I have to heartily second this opinion.  Having done several  
moderately sized systems in Swing I find that I rather enjoy working  
with it as a GUI methodology.  But there is a definite learning curve  
while you learn to "think Swing", but once you're there you can  
implement powerful interface features in a reusable way quite easily.   
(Of course it's also possible that the complexity simply appeals to my  
inner geek...)

When I started working with Swing I spent quite a bit of time looking  
for best practices information and ended up licensing a tool/library/ 
template thing called Swing Suite from JGoodies (http://www.jgoodies.com/ 
).  It's more complicated than a simple "Hello, World" type example  
but it really helped me organize my own projects in a rational way.   
Because Swing doesn't impose any particular structure on your  
application there are many, many ways to skin the proverbial cat.  I'm  
sure there are other great examples or approaches that work very well;  
this just happens to be the one that I found when I was in need.

Also, I would strongly recommend looking at a GUI builder tool for  
interface construction rather than coding that stuff by hand.  I  
personally swear by a product called JFormDesigner (http://www.jformdesigner.com/ 
) because it's IDE-neutral and produces plain old Java code as its  
final output.  Oh, and it works really well, too.

t.

On 8-Feb-2008, at 11:18 AM, olsonw@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Swing can be very powerful if used correctly; I personally prefer it  
> to
> may other GUI toolkits.  Unfortunately, most people don't use it
> correctly.
>
> If you understand the MVC deign pattern (which Swing uses  
> extensively),
> and think of your GUIs as a collection of containers within  
> containers,
> Swing can make perfect sense, and can make some excellent interfaces.
>
> Cheers