CommunityOne 2007: Swing GUI Building with Matisse: Chapter II

This session was presented by Joshua Marinacci, Shannon Hickey, Hans Muller and other Sun technical leads behind NetBeans, Swing Application Framework, and Beans Binding. This session was practically a demo of NetBeans GUI Builder improvements and support for JSR 296: Swing Application Framework and JSR 295: Beans Binding.

The logic behind the Swing Application Framework is to provide a framework to help novice swing developers get up and running. The desktop client API stack is pretty large and intimidating when starting a Swing application from scratch. Swing Application Framework can be explained in an hour, and is small and simple enough for small to medium size applications.

The demo demonstrated how to use GUI Builder to construct a Swing Application Framework-based application mashup that downloads images from Flickr based on a given search criteria. They tied the model with the UI with Beans Binding. Beans Binding keeps two properties from two objects in sync. Shannon Hickey, the specification lead of JSR 295 said that “Beans Binding is going to be great for Swing when finished.” Beans Binding describes the source properties using Java Expression Language. The Beans Binding will accommodate objects that don’t follow the beans pattern, such as maps which will be treated as dynamic beans. Beans application model to Swing UI components.

These guys built a Flickr client using NetBeans, Data Binding, Swing Application Framework in four minutes flat.

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