[Ldsoss] Non-Web Application Frameworks

[Ben Galbraith]

Coming to this thread a bit late. I am a founding member of the JSR  
296 Expert Group; there's not much to say about that effort yet, but  
keep an eye on it. Your feedback as to what it should handle (the  
list below) is good and we're certainly targeting much of that.

RE: JGoodies, which is a one man show: Karsten Lentzch. Karsten's  
stuff is good; use it whenever it applies to your problem domain. I  
have two complaints: Looks is starting to look dated; Bindings is  
very complex.

RE: Eclipse. I don't disagree with previous comments. RCP is well- 
architected but under-documented and hard-to-use. The SWT toolkit  
upon which it is based is good if you to write Windows programs in  
Java, but I'm not crazy about its behavior on the Mac.

RE: Other frameworks. Keep your eye on March 9th -- there's a  
conference I'm putting on called Desktop Matters in the Bay Area;  
there may be some announcements there that address the issues you're  
discussing. The Spring RCP is nice but it's incomplete and under  
documented; it attempts to be like Eclipse RCP but for Swing.

RE: Your list:

1. Error/Exception handling -- what help are you looking for here?

2. Logging -- use log4j

3. Menus, buttons, controls. If you use an MVC architecture for your  
app, copying values back and forth to your view tier can be tedious.  
Use a binding framework to automate this. JGoodies Bindings is the  
only viable one out there; you should look at it, but you'll need to  
write some code to make it easier to use. I created my own binding  
framework for various reasons. Otherwise, Swing does a lot of the  
work towards making it somewhat easy to create actions that can  
manifest themselves in menus or buttons or different types of  
controls. I extended this mechanism to let me associate actions with  
any event in any control. It's easy to do and makes life easy.

4. Window management. What do you have in mind here? I don't see off- 
hand how window management relates to fonts and styles, but you can  
use Swing's look-and-feel mechanism to swap out themes pretty easily.

5. Look and Feel management. This works capably in vanilla swing.  
Just change the look-and-feel with Swing's API. Swing's default look,  
Metal with the Ocean theme (in Java 5) stinks. Unfortunately, there's  
not much better out there. JGoodies Plastic is okay, Incors Alloy is  
okay, Synthetica and its themes are okay. Sun has a very nice look  
(codenamed Nimbus) in-house that they may choose to implement in Java  
at some point. I'm working to accelerate this process and may have  
some news to announce sometime soon.

6. Tables. Swing gives you editable tables out of the box. Sorting is  
part of Java 6 and can be obtained today via the SwingLabs open- 
source project on java.net. You can also use one of the various  
vendor-provided tables, such as JIDE's components. I've done a ton of  
work on making tables easier in my consulting and may have an  
announcement on open sourcing that work around March 9. Spring RCP  
also has some good work, such as providing a table that reflects on  
object properties.

7. Multi-threading. Rich topic. Sun has their SwingWorker class which  
you can use a baseline. There are other third-party projects that  
help in this area (FoxTrot, Spin) but nothing goes as far as it ought  
to. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I've done some work  
in this area, watch for March 9 announcement.

8. Copy/paste. Beyond what Java gives you out of the box, what are  
you looking for?

9. Message boxes. JOptionPane is a factory for dialogs in Swing. It  
does a capable job with small messages. You'll need to hand-roll  
support for something more ambitious. Check out SwingLabs for help here.

10. File access. Hmm... Java's pretty rich here, what do you need?

11. Properties. What do you mean?

I've given a few presentations on these topics -- perhaps the most  
relevant will be the recent talk I gave at 2006 JavaOne:

http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2006//desktop/ 
TS-1913.html

My laser-focus with Swing is helping developers be productive with it  
and the talk ("Eight Ways To Be More Productive with Swing") tries to  
address that.

If you're overall impression is that you wish there was just an  
existing framework that could handle this stuff for you -- the bad  
news is that there isn't, but the good news is that there's a lot of  
activity in this area. I think 2007 will be an interesting year for  
Desktop Java, especially with some of the great enhancements Java 6  
is bringing to the table (though perhaps Adobe's Apollo project and  
MSFT's WPF will steal some of this thunder).

Good luck,

Ben

On Oct 31, 2006, at 12:20 PM, Mitch Butler wrote:

> I'm a low-level OS-type guy with a reasonable amount of Java  
> knowledge. However, I'm a beginner at things like GUIs and Swing. I  
> have an idea for a Java Application that I would like to develop.  
> It will a standalone program that runs on a single machine and must  
> have a reasonably good GUI.
>
> I've been teaching myself Swing, and all that stuff is very cool.  
> But I find myself having to write too much stuff from scratch that  
> I know has been done before. Plus my framework stuff doesn't look  
> very nice! I need an Application Framework to hang my code on.
>
> I stayed up late last night (too late according to my wife!)  
> searching the Web, and I found a few candidates: Aloe, JSR 296,  
> JGoodies, Eclipse, XUI. There are also a whole host of other  
> frameworks (too many!) that are targeted more at Web-type  
> applications (AJAX, JLense, Radicore, etc.). I don't think I'm  
> ready for those yet. But then I don't know, as I will want to learn  
> Web App development eventually.
>
> Anyway, does anyone have experience with those that I mentioned or  
> others that I don't know about yet? I want to be able to quickly  
> and easily prototype my ideas. I'm looking for something that helps  
> me with the following kinds of things:
>
> - Error/Exception handling
> - Logging (of events and special conditions)
> - Menus, buttons, controls
> - Window management (changing fonts and styles)
> - Look and Feel management (I want to try different L&Fs to see  
> what I like)
> - Tables of data, sortable in different ways, and editable
> - Printing facilities for reports
> - Multi-threading (kicking off a background task, and updating the  
> GUI with progress)
> - Copy/Paste
> - Message boxes
> - File access
> - Properties
>
> The one thing I don't need is a database. My data is reasonably  
> small, so I plan to just serialize the objects into a file and  
> reload them into memory whenever the App starts up. That is  
> actually the kind of code that I am pretty good at. It is the GUI  
> stuff that gives me fits.
>
> I'm using Eclipse as my IDE, and I especially like the idea of  
> actually using Eclipse as the framework itself (RCP). But that  
> sounds like a huge learning curve and perhaps overkill, and I want  
> to have something working soon in my spare time.
>
> Anyway, I suppose if I spent several weeks with each of the above  
> technologies, I could eventually figure out which one meets my  
> needs best. But I don't want to do that right now (lazy me!). So,  
> I'm looking for advice from those who have more experience in this  
> area.
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