Re: Create Graphical interface

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