Gregg Bolinger - java tag

Stripes Book Promo @ JavaRanch

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:58:00 GMT

Frederic Daoud is promoting his new book Stripes...and Java web development is fun again all this week at JavaRanch in the Application Frameworks forum. 4 lucky people will be drawn on Friday to win a free copy of Freddy's book so get to JavaRanch and ask him some questions about Stripes and his book.

Java6 Drag and Drop JTree to JList

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:47:00 GMT

Like I said in my last post, I spent a lot of time trying to get drag and drop to work from a JTree to a JList. I noticed someone trying to do the same thing in the Swing forum on JavaRanch so I ripped out my code I wrote, cleaned it up, and am posting here for consumption and criticism. I didn't do some things that needed to be done like actually writing code in the canImport method. I just returned true for simplicity. I also didn't bother trying to transfer all the children of a node to the JList.

Part 3 of ?: Swing Application Best Practices

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:55:00 GMT

If you haven't seen Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I invite you to read those. I'm really excited about the amount of response I have received on these posts and I really think something good can come out of this. The only problem thus far is I have received an email from 1 person wanting to join the project. I can't do this alone and I can't do it with 2 people. For this to work I really need more participation on the actual project so if you would like to help in any way please send me a gmail address to gdboling AT you know the rest.

We should start talking about what kind of application we can build that will provide a good foundation for everything we want to try and accomplish. Here are a few points to think about as we try and come up with ideas:

It has to be simple yet interesting
It needs to support multiple forms
It should try and use as many components as makes sense. It doesn't need to a be SwingSet demo but at the same time, if a concept can't cary over to multiple components we need to provide good examples.
It doesn't have to be RIA. I believe the things we are trying show and learn can apply to any type of Swing application. There are just some things that RIA's require that aren't what we care about right now and I don't want to get hung up on something.
Persistence shouldn't matter. We should begin by mocking it if we need to in order to keep things simple. If later we want to supply different persistence layers then fine. But that is not our goal.

So let's hear some wonderful ideas. After I get a few I'll chime in with the ones I have in mind.

Part 2 of ?: Swing Application Best Practices

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:03:00 GMT

In Part 1 I introduced the need for a simple project to help demonstrate and teach Swing best practices. Today I want to talk about areas of focus or areas in Swing development where best practices actually lend a helping hand. How to create and add a JButton to a container is not what I think we need. How to best handle events for a JButton might be what we should focus on. Here is a (partial) list of areas in no particular order:

Part 1 of ?: Swing Application Best Practices

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:19:00 GMT

Today I have been participating in a small thread on JavaRanch titled Swing desktop application best practices. David's question in that thread is one I remember asking years ago and in fact never got a good answer. To this day I still look for the answer and only find it hidden deep inside existing open source projects who's code base is daunting to say the least for new developers or hidden inside a framework as generally one engineers idea of best practice.

The communities focus over the past several years has been in web application development. Interestingly enough, for the most part, finding answers to best practice questions regarding web development is easy. With the rise in interest in java on the desktop and Sun doing what it thinks is right to push this surge I think now is an opportune time to try and finally start answering Swing best practice questions as a community, as an industry.

I don't intend to try and be the pioneer here. I don't know enough by myself to drive an effort like this. There are more capable engineers out there. I'm here to spark some community interest. A rally cry if you will. So how do we do this? Telling developers to go look at Netbeans source is not an answer. It's too large to try and learn basic concepts of best practices. No doubt is is full of useful patterns to learn from but finding them is tough in a code base that large.

My idea is to start with a very small and simple open source project that is purely for learning purposes. The code base should be overly commented. This would be a project where seasoned engineers could lend their expertise while at the same time young developers could read and understand the code base. So the code base needs to stay relatively small. I envision no frameworks being used. I believe this app should stay as streamlined for learning Swing best practices as possible. If that means reinventing a few wheels then I am ok with that. The documentation should mention where a particular existing framework takes care of that. However, I'm open to suggestion regarding this stance.

My nest article will cover areas of concern that I believe need to be of focus for a Swing application used for learning best practices. I'd really like some feedback here regarding the idea and to know who might be interesting in helping as well as those that would be interested is learning.