Arrrrrgh, Swing!

[blahblahblahh]

And this ?

That’s not documentation. It’s a marketing document to prepare interested parties before the product is ready.

It’s ridiculous to offer it as LaF docs, since it has only ONE PARAGRAPH and a 3-way circular link in the glossary. It also has a very short appendix explaining how to switch the current LaF. Wow!

To recap: 0.000 documentation covering Swing LaFs. Except how to select one at runtime (and even that is incomplete!)

[system]

I recently bought a book to help me with my Swing woes, “Swing 2nd Edition”. It’s good and bad…there are a number of typos, unfortunately, and the index is total crap - but even with these things it explains so much better the fundamental concepts of Swing. I’ve been through the Java Tutorial on Swing, I own the “Core Java Volume 2: Advanced Features” for 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 - none of which were particularly helpful when developing a Swing app that wasn’t directly copied from the book.

I highly recommend this book, but if I were you guys I might wait and hope for “Swing 3rd Edition” - but honestly, it’s cleared up so many little misunderstandings that I had about Swing from all the other so-called documentation - it was the light at the end of a 4 year tunnel, I tell you.

[grlea]

Some more resources for anyone still reading this thread, these presentations are great.

For people who think Swing is slow:
“Professional Swing: Threading”

For people with other Swing gripes (L&F, ease-of-use):
“Professional Swing: Creating Polished Applications”

[nikster]

Layout: Explicit Table Builder
Awesome “builder” (i.e. facade) over Explicit Layout that makes building layouts on a table structure (which covers pretty much anything that’s designed correctly) really easy.

Action Logic: GUI Commands
An extension of Swing’s “Actions” that makes the concept useful. Basically, you write your business logic in a Command, and then ask that command for a component (e.g. button, menu item, whatever) that connects to the command. Sounds weird, but once you use it, it makes a whole lot more sense than having anonymous ActionListeners all over the place.

Look & Feel: JGoodies Looks
Really good looking Multi-Platform L&F. Also has a really accurate (supposedly) Windows L&F emulation. (I use the multi-platform ‘Plastic’ look).

Threading: Foxtrot
Lets you execute time-expensive code from the Swing Event Thread while allowing other events on the Event Queue to keep pumping. Just brilliant. Have a look at the examples if you don’t understand.

Logging: Simple Log
18K logging library that’s really simple to use and works with essentially no configuration. Lots of features, though.

the above should be on the very first page in the Swing tutorials. would save everyone lots of trouble. thanks for this!

ad Swing in general:

• The biggest problem i have with Swing is that all the defaults are wrong, for example in GridBagLayout. what you want most is not the default. I resorted to writing my own util classes to help with getting GBL to work nicely. nevertheless, it’s a PITA. (ad: first poster, what you want to do in GBL works, you just need to know how)
• Another issue is that there isn’t just one way to do something. Usually, you can achieve the same result in a zillion different ways. Many of which are subtly wrong. That means only one thing: Badly designed framework.
• There are no guidelines on how to do things. Sun doesn’t tell you, for example, how to use ActionListeners. Do whatever you want.
• The above holds true for Swing itself too. If you look at the source code, it’s a huge mess, where everybody does whatever they think they want to do. No conventions, messy code, outright stupid mistakes, lots of static state-keeping fields… There were no coding guidelines or if there were, they were not enforced…
• No native L&F. How hard would it be for Sun to just use the Windows L&F that is installed on the system? Then Java apps would just look like any other app, even after installing SP-whatever. Emulating this with their own bitmaps is just silly. Take SWT as an example in this regard. The app looks just way more professional.

[/rant]

I know about threading and these things (and Foxtrot! Yey!) so speed isn’t an issue. In fact, Swing is damn fast. I am timing my app and creating even very complex layouts with images and stuff takes usually in the range of 30ms. That’s FPS-ready response time. Swing is a lot of things, but it is not slow.

[mthornton]

[quote]The most recent class I’ve added to my project is a layout manager that only handles two objects: it gives 25% of the space to one, and 75% to the other. It’s bloody simple, and has solved all my layout problems. I’m absolutely amazed that I couldn’t shoehorn any of the current layout managers into performing this trivial task. Ho-hum.
[/quote]
In 1.5 (5.0) you can do that with SpringLayout. Previously SpringLayout was rather incomplete. However SpringLayout is intended to be used by gui builders and not directly via hand coding.

[blahblahblahh]

The most recent class I’ve added to my project is a layout manager that only handles two objects: it gives 25% of the space to one, and 75% to the other. It’s bloody simple, and has solved all my layout problems. I’m absolutely amazed that I couldn’t shoehorn any of the current layout managers into performing this trivial task. Ho-hum.

I did something similar, but with more options and a sprinkling of cleverness. I have been threatening to tidy it up, document it, and put it online for free for…oh, about 8 months now. Whoops.

Hopefully I’ll get around to it once JGFv3 is live. That thing is now a great big monster clinging to my back, weighing me down :(.